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On December 18, 1943, Robert Henry Keys was born at Lubbock Army Airfield near Slaton, Texas. On the same day, across the Atlantic in Dartford, England, a boy named Keith Richards arrived in the world. The two would not meet for more than twenty years. When they did, it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives.
Slaton sits in Lubbock County, about 25 miles southeast of Lubbock on the South Plains of West Texas. It was built by the railroad — the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which established Slaton as a division headquarters in 1911 and gave the town its economic spine. Bobby Keys’ father, Bill, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed at the Lubbock airfield when Bobby was born. His mother Lucy was sixteen years old.
By 1946, the family relocated to Belen, New Mexico, where Bill had found work with the Santa Fe Railroad. But young Bobby stayed behind in Slaton with his grandparents — “an arrangement he was quite happy with,” according to his biography. Slaton was his home: a flat, wind-scoured West Texas railroad town where the Santa Fe yards defined the landscape and the sounds of the plains defined the silence between trains.
The Place That Made Him
West Texas in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not an obvious place to forge a musical career. But it was a place that produced musicians with a particular quality — a directness, a lack of ornamentation, a commitment to the groove above everything else. That quality would define Bobby Keys for the rest of his life.
The saxophone found him in his early teens, and once it did, he never put it down. He began playing in Lubbock and the surrounding area, drawn into the orbit of a West Texas music scene that was then producing some of the most important sounds in American music. Slaton gave him the rootedness. Lubbock gave him the education. And the wider world gave him a stage that turned out to be as large as rock and roll itself.