Good Ol' Classic Blues Songs

[uwe]

Very nice voice, the man.

[Dave W]

Robert Junior Lockwood was the last link to Robert Johnson. He passed away about 4 years ago. Johnson was his mother's boyfriend for a while and allegedly taught him to play guitar.

[Pilgrim]

Blues comedy = Blind Melon Chitlin!

[nofi]

lockwood died only 4 years ago? wow. i have a record from the mid eighties and he looks like he could go any second. good for him that he managed to hang around awhile.

[Dave W]

lockwood died only 4 years ago? wow. i have a record from the mid eighties and he looks like he could go any second. good for him that he managed to hang around awhile.

Not only did he hang around that long, he was still touring fairly regularly.

His NYT obit says he was still doing a weekly gig in Cleveland until about 3 weeks before he died. He was 91.

[nofi]

a little list of some of led zep's 'stolen originals'.

babe i'm gonna leave you- written by anne bredon in late 50's.

since i've been loving you- lyrics taken from moby grape song "never".

moby dick- main guitar riff taken from 1961 bobby parker tune "watch your step".

you shook me- willie dixon.

dazed and confused- folk tune written by jake holmes.

in my time of dyin'- trad folk tune, blind willie johnson.

lemon song- based heavily on howlin wolf's "killing floor".

bring it on home- willie dixon.

whole lotta love- willie dixon lyrics from "you need love".

nobodys fault but mine- blind willie johnson.

when the levee breaks- memphis minnie.

you can argue inspiration or plagerism. to their credit zep did give cedit to the original authors of dyer maker. not much in the grand scheme of things, though.

[Basvarken]

[nofi]

this all is pretty amazing. way more than i suspected. page said in an interview it was his job to write a new guitar part and plant to change lyrics when they 'stole' a song. they  didn't try very hard, though.

the world's richest cover band...

[Dave W]

THE THIEVING MAGPIES

[uwe]

May I come up to the artistic defense of my beloved Led Zep?  

The fact that Zep stole blues riffs without proper credit is well-established and proof galore. But I never saw them as the second coming of The Beatles. Zep's importance as an influence is not in their songwritng, it's in their sound and the folk- and world music influences they added to American blues. They took those American old bluesers' songs and turned them into a new art form with their esoteric, yet larger than life presentation of them. The sound they forged was lightyears away from the originals, much farther away from the originals than say Bluesbreakers, Yardbirds, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Savoy Brown, Foghat etc. Zep were hugely influenced by the blues, but not overawed by it. The bluesiest non-blues band on earth. They took the blues somewhere else, sonically and culturally. For that they deserve credit and it is their lasting legacy.

The sour note is that - probably at the instigation of their prince of darkness svengali Peter Grant -they attempted to withhold deserved royalties from people who had a fraction of the wealth (and fortune in life) of these four young white multi-millionaires. That was a real cheap shot.

But they didn't just steal from black guys.

[nofi]

interesting thoughts but the facts, if not the songs remain the same. all they had to do is give credit where credit is due. i don't think they would really miss the loss of royalties. on the otherhand they did 'customize' sixteen or so songs...

[uwe]

I came to their artistic defense, not their morals which might have been indeed questionable! There is of course that lingering bad taste that in the late sixties/early seventies swiping a song from a black blueser from the South with no huge record company in his back was not quite as risky as if you had done the same to, say, Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley (the Colonel would have set you right!). I can't exclude that that might have played a role in the decision to ignore their intellectual property along the cynical lines of "these guys will never get their act together to do something against us, look how they always have the worst contracts, and if they do we can feed them a morsel then". Black blues artists just didn't have the commercial (and therefore also legal) clout of their soul contemporaries with Motown and Stax.

[Dave W]

Willie Dixon sued them and won.

[uwe]

I know. But he only got around to doing that  in 85 - almost 20 years after Whole Lotta Love had first sent the bee swarm through the stereos. Donated the settlement sum they paid him to a Blues Foundation too.

[Dave W]

That's because he hadn't heard it until his daughter pointed it out. He also sued and won over Bring It On Home.

He established that foundation and his survivors run it. Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven Foundation