The reasons why bluesman Robert Johnson is so revered today go far beyond his founding of the notorious “27 Club”, his legendary meeting with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads, or even his unparalleled brilliance with a guitar in his hand. They extend right through the kernel of electric blues music in Chicago, where Johnson’s influence was imported from Mississippi by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, and Johnson’s contemporary Sonny Boy Williamson II.
And they’re evident in just about every blue-eyed blues act that made a name in the 1960s, from the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton’s work with the Yardbirds and John Mayall & the Bluesneakers. Nowhere is Johnson’s musical legacy more pronounced, though, than in the recordings of Led Zeppelin. Steered by guitarist, songwriter and producer Jimmy Page as well as vocalist and blues fanatic Robert Plant, Zeppelin were steeped in the blues records their members discovered during their teenage years.
An entire generation of young British musicians came of age as they entered a movement of African-American blues and R&B music. The epicentre of this movement was London’s Marquee Club, where Page and Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones honed their craft, but it extended as far north as Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the northeast of England, home to The Animals.
Arguably, no single record was more important to this generation than King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation album featuring 16 original songs by Robert Johnson, which was released by Columbia Records in 1961. At least Plant certainly thinks so, as he’s namechecked the album repeatedly down the years and told National Public Radio in 2004 that Johnson was the musician “to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.”
They couldn’t have known it back when they put out their collection of Johnson’s songs, but Columbia had timed the release perfectly to ride this wave of blues revivalism among British teens. It brought his music to a whole new audience and elevated his legend to a higher plane. And it meant that when Zeppelin came to reinterpret the blues on their own hard-rock terms as the ‘60s neared their end, Johnson was the blues player they drew inspiration from above all others.
But which Zeppelin songs are based on Johnson’s?
They actually covered Johnson’s song ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’ during one of their first tours of the UK in the summer of 1969. The band played a version of it for the BBC at London’s Aeolian Hall, which was broadcast on BBC Radio and later included in the Led Zeppelin Boxed Set in 1990.
There are also three songs in Zeppelin’s back catalogue that lift elements directly from Johnson’s own compositions. The first of these was ‘You Shook Me’, a track from their self-titled debut album, which, on the face of it, is a cover of the Dixon-penned Muddy Waters single of the same name. Yet its second verse is wholly derived from the Johnson song ‘Stones in My Passway’.
Next came ‘The Lemon Song’ from Led Zeppelin II, which adapts another Willie Dixon composition by adding a line Johnson wrote for ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’. “Squeeze me, babe, till the juice runs down my leg,” Plant sings in a verse refrain that mimics Johnson’s blues melody.
Zeppelin then waited several more years before paying homage to Johnson in another song when they released ‘Trampled Under Foot’ on their sixth studio album, Physical Graffiti, in 1975. The song’s innovative triple-octave guitar hook actually builds on Johnson’s riff from ‘Terraplane Blues’, which lends some lyrical inspiration to the Zeppelin track, too. The earlier composition uses car parts as metaphors for female anatomy, and, as well as the basic idea, Plant takes references to checking “underneath your hood” and “oil” straight from Johnson.
All the same, there’s no question that Led Zeppelin’s music broke new ground for rock music in ways the Delta and Chicago blues players could never have imagined. But none of their musical innovations would have been possible without one mysterious Mississippi blues singer, whose songwriting changed the course of rock and roll before it’d even begun.