Long before Rod Stewart was filling arenas and topping charts around the world, there was one musical style that made his heart beat fastest. According to Stewart himself, the genre that first ignited his passion for music wasn’t rock, pop or even soul — it was rhythm and blues, the raw, emotional sound that first captured his imagination as a young listener.
Stewart, whose gravelly voice and charismatic delivery made him one of the most recognizable figures in rock history, has spoken often about the early influences that helped shape his musical identity. Among them, he cites the R&B records he heard as a teenager with particular affection — the way they combined feeling with groove, intensity with vulnerability, and storytelling with musicality.
This early love didn’t just influence a few songs here and there. R&B helped inform Stewart’s approach to phrasing, tone and performance throughout his career. Even as he embraced rock, pop and later blues-inflected balladry, that foundational love of rhythm and blues remained at the core of his sound.
Stewart has often talked about how key records and artists in the R&B world made him sit up and pay attention — not just as a fan, but as someone who wanted to be part of the music. Listening to those early grooves, he said, was less about categories or genres and more about the feeling — the kind that makes you want to sing, sway or just lose yourself in the moment.
“Rhythm and blues was my first musical love,” Stewart once reflected.
“It taught me how to listen and how to feel music in a way that nothing else did at that age.”
Even as his tastes expanded — from rock to soul to pop standards and beyond — Stewart’s early R&B influence never disappeared. It showed up in the phrasing of his performances, in the looseness of his groove, and in the way he approached melody and rhythm as a singer.
Unlike many artists who can trace their influences back to a single guitar riff or record store moment, Stewart’s journey began with a sound — a musical language that spoke directly to his emotions and shaped how he heard everything that came after.
For fans, knowing that Stewart’s first love was rhythm and blues adds depth to his catalog. Listening back through his hits, you can hear echoes of that early passion — the swinging feels, the vocal inflections, the sensibilities that refused to be boxed into one particular lane.
In the end, it wasn’t about labels or scenes. For Stewart, it was about the power of a groove, the pull of a beat, and the lasting influence of the music that captured his heart first — long before the world knew his name.
