This Rolling Stones No. 1 Hit From 1973 Is A Tender Ballad — But No One Can Agree Who It's About

Just after 1973 provided the decade's best summer of music, the Rolling Stones spent a week at No. 1 with the vulnerable and confessional breakup song "Angie." While the emotions in the song are heartfelt and well-conveyed, more than 50 years later, nobody associated with "Angie" will reveal its inspiration. Most known for its hard-rocking, blues-influenced numbers, the Rolling Stones could get sensitive if need be, and it embraced its emotions on this earnest song, a return to the style of lesser-known slow songs from the group's early days, such as "Back Street Girl" and "Lady Jane." "Angie, I still love you," singer Mick Jagger admits, mourning a romance gone dead, adding, "Where will it lead us from here?"

So, who is Angie from "Angie"? It may be one woman, multiple real-life women, or none at all. At any rate, the Rolling Stones don't feel the need to clear it up, making the story behind "Angie" one of the biggest mysteries in classic rock still unsolved today.

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, have had a turbulent relationship, but the Rolling Stones' respective lead guitarist and vocalist still wrote together, with the former handling melodies and the latter doing the lyrics. "Angie" was a slight exception, with Richards settling on the title when he developed the song. A case can be made that "Angie" refers to Dandelion Angela, Richards' child, born in 1972. "I'd recently had my daughter born, whose name was Angela, and the name was starting to ring around the house," Keith Richards said in the liner notes for "Jump Back (The Best of the Rolling Stones '71 – '93)." "But I'm not into writing songs about my babies. Angie just fitted." But in his 2010 memoir "Life," Richards recalled composing "Angie" during a period in a drug detox facility. "I just went 'Angie, Angie.' It was not about any particular person," he wrote. "I didn't know Angela was going to be called Angela when I wrote 'Angie.'"

Nevertheless, legends persist that "Angie" was about someone in Jagger's life. After David Bowie's wife, Angela, allegedly caught her husband and Jagger in an intimate situation, Jagger may have conceived "Angie" to lower the temperature. Another story floated is that Jagger penned lyrics that reflected his feelings about the end of his romance with singer Marianne Faithfull. Like the Bowie connection, that tale behind the No. 1 hit has never been conclusively proven.