By the time 1971 rolled around,Led Zeppelinhad hugely impressed rock fans across the globe with their fearless, heavy, and loud sound. Their third record, released in 1970, featured the incredibly powerful “Immigrant Song,” but songs like “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” also from III, and the elusive “Black Mountain Side” from their debut showed how Led Zeppelin had country and blues sensibilities. The tracks, though not slow, stripped back the band’s typical heavy, electric instrumentation to get sonically closer to the more traditional American genres.
However, on IV, released in 1971, Led Zeppelin were ready to explore blues more curiously and with more historical closeness. The fourth studio album closes with “When The Levee Breaks,” which begins with the iconic and mightily heavy drums of John Bonham and the wailing fuzz of electric guitar and sludgy harmonica. It’s a heavy awakening to the 7-minute closer of the album, which is arguably the band’s best, but it wasn’t actually their own making. The song was more than blues-inspired, but was a direct rework of a classic of the genre dating back to 1929.
The Blues Roots of “When The Levee Breaks”
“When The Levee Breaks” was not a product of Led Zeppelin’s original writing, but their rework of a 1920s blues classic was revolutionary. The song was first written and performed by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929 as a reflection upon the tragic experiences they faced following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The original lyrics tell the story of the fear of ever-pouring rain and the effects it would have on a man afraid of losing his home and having nobody to talk to about it. The zoomed-in personal story embedded within a greater social issue is a fundamental feature of blues music, and one that makes that style of music so intoxicating to listen to. The narrative speaks to a great number of people who can relate, and speaks deeply to those whose feelings resonate with those of the narrator.
Led Zeppelin did a great job of repurposing this. Frontman Robert Plant used original lyrics from the 1929 song, but reordered them in a different order to fit the reworked structure of the song accordingly. The lyrics are distributed more sparsely throughout the 7-minute anthem to accommodate a heavier instrumental filling and a slower, more dramatic vocal delivery. The original version ends with “The mean old levee taught me to weep and moan / Told me leave my baby and my happy home,” whilst Zeppelin’s last line of the song is “Sorry, but I can’t take you / Goin’ down, goin’ down now,” repeated many times over a myriad of distorted guitars and heavy drums. The original ending is somewhat abrupt, resulting in a rather definitive acceptance of the sad effects of the levee, whereas the drama of Led Zeppelin’s heavy rock and mysteriously elusive apology takes the mind to a place of expanded questioning, almost distracted by the instrumentally overwhelming close.
Unlike some rock bands, Led Zeppelin, namely Plant, openly credited the original writer and performing writer of the song, Memphis Minnie. All other members of Led Zeppelin were named as songwriters on their version, and rightly so. The shared credits of band members and Memphis Minnie reflect on the great things that can be achieved when truly thoughtful musicians come together, even across generations.
The Contemporary Sound Of Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks”
Despite the electric and heavily processed instrumentation of Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks,” the use of the harmonica, which was not featured in the original, is a clever bridge between Zeppelin’s blues rock and the traditional inclusion of the instrument in older and more refined forms of blues music. Led Zeppelin were loudly and proudly doing their own thing while referencing the music that influenced them. It’s this openness and acknowledgment of their own musical education that make them so intriguing and a great band to listen to. They intelligently place themselves on the blueprint of music by deliberately overlapping themselves between the vintage and the future.
The drums are a key part of Led Zeppelin’s transformation of the blues classic, filling the sonic field with huge percussive depth that sounds like it comes from the very core of the Earth. This was achieved by the now-famous technique of setting up the kit to be recorded at the bottom of a grand staircase, captured by microphones suspended in the air. The brilliant technique was pioneered by engineer Andy Johns, or arguably his brother Glyn Johns.
The harmonica was processed during mixing with a reverse echo effect, which is what gives it such an incredibly expansive weight in the final mix. The engineering on Led Zeppelin’s version of “When The Levee Breaks” is brilliant. The sound is just immense, achieved by using the full scope of the sonic field. “When The Levee Breaks” was the only track from IV that was mixed in Sunset Lounge, Hollywood, which is perhaps what sets it apart from the rest of the album. Page noted in Brad Tolinski’s book Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page that the key to the panning on “When The Levee Breaks” was “when everything starts moving around except for the voice, which remains stationary.”
Notorious music critic Robert Christgau said that “When The Levee Breaks” is the greatest song on IV because Led Zeppelin’s version read authentically as blues but also had “the grandeur of a symphonic crescendo,” which, in his opinion, broke past the intensely cerebral mood of blues. Through “When The Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin married traditional blues and modern rock in a way that was reverent and revolutionary. Their ability to experiment with sound while preserving the soul of the traditional style displayed their tremendous musicianship in execution and in historical understanding. Ultimately, Led Zeppelin appreciated blues and modernized it successfully to continue its great legacy.
