How Led Zeppelin turned an obscure 1929 recording from Memphis Minnie into an epic rock monolith
The composer credits for When The Levee Breaks – the closing track on Led Zeppelin’s multi-platinum fourth album (the rune-y one with Stairway To Heaven on) – read, ‘Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham & Memphis Minnie’.
The musical and cultural bloodline of Louisiana-born, Delta-raised Lizzie Douglas (1897–1973), better known to history as Memphis Minnie, runs through the veins of every woman who’s ever picked up a guitar and rocked the blues.
A powerhouse singer, guitarist and songwriter whose raunch, skill and charisma challenged the male monopoly of down-home guitar blues, she was sufficiently formidable to best the majestic Big Bill Broonzy himself in blues contests held on his own Chicago turf. Bukka White rated her as “about the best thing goin’ in the woman line”.
It’s therefore bitterly ironic that the song with which this pioneer is most frequently associated in the rock era is one she neither sang nor wrote.
The original dates back to 1929, and Minnie’s first-ever recording session. She was already a veteran of almost two decades of performing in jukes, bars and tent shows, with jug bands and on street corners, when she and her partner, Kansas Joe McCoy – a fellow singer/songwriter/guitarist, eight years her junior, with whom she’d hooked up a few years earlier – were talent-spotted by a Columbia Records scout, and the duo were whisked off to New York to record.
From that session came Minnie’s first classic, Bumble Bee. It was a huge hit, upon which Muddy Waters based his Honey Bee, just as, a little later on, Minnie’s If You See My Rooster generated a song credited to Willie Dixon and associated with Howlin’ Wolf and the Rolling Stones.
The NY session also reaped McCoy’s composition, When The Levee Breaks, sung by him and garnished with Minnie’s deft, sparkling lead guitar. It was credited to ‘Joe & Minnie McCoy’, though they didn’t marry until the following year.
The South is prone to flooding – as, tragically, we saw just in 2005 – and, not surprisingly, there’s been a whole raft of blues songs written on the subject over the years, ranging from Charley Patton’s High Water Everywhere and Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues to John Lee Hooker’s Tupelo and Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927.
Lyrically, at least, the original When The Levee Breaks is a proud part of that canon, but the drama of the lyric and the subject matter is somewhat undercut by the musical setting: Joe McCoy’s rhythm guitar is almost-folky mid-tempo ragtime, while Minnie’s intricate, dancing lead tempers the deceptive jauntiness with melancholy minor-scale inflections. McCoy’s lead vocal is plain, almost matter-of-fact.
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