Album:
The song is on Beggars Banquet which entered the Australian albums chart* on 22 February 1969 and peaked at #3.
Songwriter:
Mick Jagger (credited as Jagger–Richards)
Producer:
Jimmy Miller
Record label of Australian release:
Decca
*Kent Music Report / Australian Chart Book. See About.
Wikipedia:
Mick Jagger sings in first person narrative as the Devil, who boasts of his role in each of several historical atrocities and repeatedly asks the listener to “guess my name.” The singer implicitly chastises the listeners for their collective culpability in the listed killings and crimes.
In the 2012 documentary Crossfire Hurricane, Jagger stated that his influence for the song came from Baudelaire and from the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (which had just appeared in English translation in 1967). The book was given to Jagger by Marianne Faithfull and she confirmed the inspiration in an interview for the magazine Mojo in 2005.
In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said, “I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song.” It was Keith Richards who suggested changing the tempo and using additional percussion, turning the folk song into a samba.
Upon release, some religious groups said that the Stones were devil worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth. The band was already in trouble with conservative groups (and the BBC) for songs like Let’s Spend the Night Together.
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy_for_the_Devil
Lyrics:
Please allow me to introduce myself
I′m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man′s soul an faith
I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Click for full lyrics
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