This morning as we we went about our waking up, we were listening
to my Chill And Groove playlist, one of our usual morning
listens. Shuffle turned up side B of Led Zeppelin IV: Misty
Mountain Hop, Four Sticks, Going To California and the climactic
When The Levee Breaks. Levee's drum intro is, as far as I'm
concerned, the very embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.
I was thinking as I pulled on my socks how it would make a
dope sample, and how I'm sure many people have had that thought.
Several hours later I came into the Tea Lounge, and as I
sat down, they were playing a glassy 90s alternative rock
song of the kind that I generally don't have much use for,
except this one really had a groove to it. I didn't know the
song, but the chorus had a catchy vocal hook, "Damn I
wish I was your lover", and googling revealed it to be
a tune of the same name by one Sophie
B Hawkins.
Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover
Reading further, it turns out that the song's ridiculously
compelling beat contains a sample of...'When
The Levee Breaks'! There are no coincidences, says Richard
Dawkins, so I've decided to get to the bottom of this.
The famous John Bonham drum performance in question was recorded
by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a former poorhouse
in Headley, East Hampshire, England. Johns placed Bonham and
a new drumkit at the bottom of a stairwell, and placed the
mics at the top three stories above. This odd arrangement
makes for a big, powerful, yet oddly diffuse and distant sound.
In addition to the Sophie B Hawkins song, the Levee drum intro
also appears in one of my favorite songs by Björk.
Army of Me
It also turns up on some classic hip-hop albums, like Dr
Dre's The Chronic.
Lyrical Gangbang
It's funny that Levee has been appropriated by so many artists
for their own work, since the Zeppelin song is itself appropriated
from an older work. Like so many classic British rock songs,
Levee is an adaptation of an old Delta blues tune, in this
case one written and first recorded by husband and wife Kansas
Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929.
When The Levee Breaks by Memphis Minnie
The song is a reaction to the upheaval caused by the Great
Mississippi Flood of 1927, which ravaged the state of Mississippi
and surrounding areas. It destroyed many homes and crippled
the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Most of
the farm workers were forced to flee to the cities of the
Midwest in search of work, contributing to the large-scale
black urban migration of the first half of the twentieth century.
As you might imagine, the flood was the subject of numerous
blues songs. 'When the Levee Breaks' focused mainly on the
evacuation of more than thirteen thousand people in and near
Greenville, Mississippi. They were moved to a nearby, unaffected
levee for its shelter at higher ground. Black plantation workers
were forced to work on the levee at gunpoint, piling sandbags
to save the neighboring towns. After the levee breached, blacks
weren't allowed to leave the area, and were forced to work
in the relief and cleanup effort, living in camps with limited
access to the supplies which were coming in. Are you getting
a Katrina tingle? Many musicians have covered the Zeppelin
version of 'Levee' over the past few years as a commentary
on how little GWB et al care about poor black people.
Like a lot of hip blue-collar British guys of his generation,
Robert Plant collected old American blues records, and his
collection included the McCoy and Minnie recording. Deleting
and rearranging lines and line parts from the original song
and adding new lyrics, combined with a revamped melody, Zeppelin's
version is almost a completely different piece of music. The
album is one of the most ubiquitous music recordings on earth,
which is ironic since Zep themselves barely ever played the
song. Because 'Levee' was so heavily produced in the studio,
it was difficult to recreate onstage. The echo effects aside,
the major difficulty was the tempo. After the recording was
made, the band slowed the tape down to lower the song's pitch
and to give the song its distinctive murky, sludgy quality.
It's quite challenging to play groovy heavy rock at such a
slow tempo without losing energy. The band only performed
'Levee' twice before dropping it.
Since seventy-eight years have passed since Memphis Minnie's
version was recorded in 1929, the song is now in the public
domain, meaning anyone can record it without paying royalties.
Did Minnie ever get royalties from Zep or anyone else during
her period of copyright ownership? I couldn't find out from
my cursory Internet research, but I did learn other things
about her. Memphis Minnie McCoy was born Lizzie Douglas in
1897, in Algiers, Louisiana. After learning to play guitar
and banjo as a child, at the age of thirteen she ran away
from home to Memphis, Tennessee, playing guitar in nightclubs
and on the street as Lizzie "Kid" Douglas. The next
year, she joined the Ringling Brothers circus. Her second
marriage and recording debut came in 1929, both with Kansas
Joe McCoy, when a Columbia Records talent scout heard them
playing in a Beale Street barbershop in their distinctive
'Memphis style', and their song 'Bumble Bee' became a hit.
In the 1930s she moved to Chicago, and by 1939 she was with
Little Son Joe, with whom she recorded nearly two hundred
(!) records. In the 1940s she formed her own touring vaudeville
company. From the 1950s on, however, public interest in her
music declined and in 1957 she and Joe returned to Memphis.
In 1961, Joe died and Minnie suffered a stroke. She spent
the rest of her life in nursing homes until her death in 1973.
Fortunately, she was able to see her reputation revived in
the 1960s as part of the general revival of interest in the
blues, though again my question remains, did she ever get
paid?
Anyway, you can see why Robert Plant might want Minnie's
records around. She was an influential and pioneering female
blues musician and guitarist. Minnie recorded for forty years,
virtually unheard of for any woman in show business at the
time. Like her predecessors Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, she
comes across as a period Missy Elliott, outspoken and sassy.
Minnie wore bracelets made of silver dollars and had a tricked-out
ride with a driver right through the Depression years. She
was the biggest female blues singer in the 1930s and into
the 1940s. One of the first blues artists to take up the electric
guitar, in 1942, she combined her Louisiana-country roots
with Memphis blues to produce her unique country-blues sound;
along with Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red, she took country
blues into electric urban blues, paving the way for giants
like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers to travel
from the small towns of the south to the big cities of the
north. She was married three times, and each husband was an
accomplished blues guitarist: "Kansas Joe" McCoy,
later of the Harlem Hamfats; Casey Bill Weldon of the Memphis
Jug Band; and Ernest Lawlers. All the way around, this chick
sounds like she might have had Army Of Me written about her,
like she would have earned mad props from Dr Dre, like, damn,
would Sophie B Hawkins wish she was her lover.
© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase
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