Sister Morphine - 2009 Mix

The Rolling Stones recorded "Sister Morphine" in 1968, but didn't release it until 1971, when it appeared on their album Sticky Fingers. Marianne Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger's girlfriend at the time, was the first to release the song; she recorded it during The Stones' Let It Bleed sessions. Her version was issued in 1969 and went nowhere - Decca Records pulled it after two weeks.

The song is about a man who gets in a car accident and dies in the hospital while asking for morphine. It originated with a tune that Jagger kept strumming when he was in London with Faithfull. Though it was lovely, she got sick of the wordless song, so she told him she'd write some lyrics. "I wrote this story about a man who'd had an accident," Faithfull told Mojo. "He's dying, and in terrible pain and all he wants is for the nurse to bring him another shot. It's definitely a kind of junkie song except that neither Mick nor I knew much about junkies back then." Faithfull added she knew a couple of people who used narcotics: Beat poet Gregory Corso and her first husband, art dealer John Dunbar. "I think, partly, if I had to put a real person in it, 'Sister Morphine' might have been Anita (Pallenberg), because she had just played nurse Bullock in the film Candy."

Marianne Faithfull wrote the lyrics, but The Stones did not give her an official songwriting credit until they released it on their 1998 live album No Security. The Stones were very protective about songwriting credits - they made sure most of their songs were credited to Jagger/Richards. When the song turned up on Sticky Fingers without a writing credit for Faithfull, she was livid. "I fought and fought until I got the credit back," she told Mojo magazine, "and I did get it back but it took at least 20 years."