Rolling Stones Drop ‘Brown Sugar’ From US Tour Over Lyrics Referencing Slavery

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The Rolling Stones have dropped their 1971 hit “Brown Sugar” from their current U.S. tour amid criticism over the song’s lyrics.

The song starts with the line, “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields.”

“You picked up on that, huh?” band member Keith Richards told The Los Angeles Times in an interview published last week when he was asked why the song wasn’t being played on the tour. “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s***.”

“I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track,” he added.

“We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes,” the band’s frontman, Mick Jagger, told the Times. “We might put it back in.”

The Rolling Stones have been on tour since late September and conclude on Nov. 20. It is the first tour the band has been on since the death in August of drummer Charlie Watts. Watts was 80 years old.