Brian Jones's 1962 letter recruiting Charlie Watts heads to Sotheby's

The letter Brian Jones sent to Charlie Watts asking him to join the band that became the Rolling Stones will be auctioned at Sotheby's this winter. Written in June 1962, it predates the group's famous name and their first Marquee Club gig on London's Oxford Street by a month.

Jones, who cofounded the group with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, opened by asking about Watts's place in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the band that drove the 1960s British blues boom. Only then did he try to recruit him away from it.

The pitch was blunt. "We are looking for a good drummer," Jones wrote. "Already we consider our band far better than Alex's – we are getting a very tightly-knit sound." He then outlined the existing lineup and assessed the drummer he wanted to replace.

"Our present drummer is atrocious," he noted. The group cycled through several drummers in its early days, so it is hard to know which one Jones was describing. Watts, a talented jazz drummer, balanced performances with the group alongside his day job in advertising.

Watts had already established himself in London's music scene, so he was reluctant to leave Blues Incorporated and quit advertising to gamble on an emerging band. It was another seven months before he officially joined the Rolling Stones in January 1963.

What the letter and its author tell us

Keith Richards described the lengths the musicians went to in order to recruit Watts, writing in his autobiography Life: "We starved ourselves to pay for him!" Watts then stayed with the band for almost six decades, until his death in 2021.

Jones was in the Stones from the founding until he was asked to leave in 1969. He died the same year at age 27. The letter is therefore a record of the band's earliest weeks, written by a founder who would not see the 1970s.

The document was delivered to "Mr C Watts" at his childhood home in Wembley. It has remained with the late drummer's family for more than six decades and is being auctioned for the very first time, with Watts's sister consigning it.

The sale at Sotheby's

The letter will be on public view at Sotheby's New York from December 2, before it is offered during the Rock & Pop sale on December 15. It is expected to fetch between $70,000 and $80,000.

A buyer is not getting an instrument or a costume but the page where the founder made his first formal move on the drummer who would stay for the rest of his life. Watts did not write it; he received it.

We have followed what musical objects fetch, from guitars in our list of the 14 most expensive guitars ever sold at auction to the K.I.T.T. tour replica from David Hasselhoff's Knight Rider that also headed to auction. A letter is a different kind of lot.

Provenance is the lot's strongest card: a single family, more than six decades, never before sold. Watts's reluctance is also part of the story, because the drummer who anchored the band for almost 60 years had to be persuaded on paper.

In June 1962 the group had no Rolling Stones name and no Marquee billing, only a founder with a pen, an ear for what his lineup lacked, and the nerve to tell a rival band's drummer his own outfit was weaker.

The dates are fixed for collectors: viewing opens in New York on December 2, and the hammer falls on December 15. Sotheby's has set the $70,000 to $80,000 estimate, and the sale is the first time the letter has changed hands.