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When the Levee Breaks
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"When the Levee Breaks" is a blues song written and first recorded by husband and wife Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929. The song is in reaction to the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
It was famously re-worked by English rock group Led Zeppelin as the last song on their fourth album, released in 1971. The lyrics in Led Zeppelin's version were partially based on the original recording.
Origin
The original work for "When the Levee Breaks" was produced by the blues musical duo known as "Kansas Joe McCoy" and "Memphis Minnie." The lines at the end of the song, "Going to Chicago; sorry but I can't take you", are quoted in "Going to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Count Basie Orchestra.
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Encyclopedia
"When the Levee Breaks" is a blues song written and first recorded by husband and wife Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929. The song is in reaction to the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
It was famously re-worked by English rock group Led Zeppelin as the last song on their fourth album, released in 1971. The lyrics in Led Zeppelin's version were partially based on the original recording.
Origin
The original work for "When the Levee Breaks" was produced by the blues musical duo known as "Kansas Joe McCoy" and "Memphis Minnie." The lines at the end of the song, "Going to Chicago; sorry but I can't take you", are quoted in "Going to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Count Basie Orchestra. In the first half of 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood ravaged the state of Mississippi and surrounding areas. It destroyed many homes and ravaged the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Many people were forced to flee to the cities of the Midwest in search of work, contributing to the "Great Migration" of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century. During the flood and the years after it subsided, it became the subject of numerous Delta blues songs, including "When the Levee Breaks", hence the lyrics, "I works on the levee, mama both night and day, I works so hard, to keep the water away" and "I's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan, gonna leave my baby, and my happy home". The song focused mainly on when more than 13,000 residents in and near Greenville, Mississippi evacuated to a nearby, unaffected levee for its shelter at high ground. The tumult that would have been caused if this and other levees had broken was the song's underlying theme.
Led Zeppelin's version
Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin had the original McCoy and Minnie recording in his personal collection. He removed and rearranged lines and line parts from the original song and added new lyrical parts (again, the lyrics focused on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927), and combined it with a revamped melody. Recording for the song took place in December 1970 at Headley Grange, where the band used the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. It had already been tried unsuccessfully by the band at Island Studios at the beginning of the recording sessions for their fourth album.
The Led Zeppelin version features a distinctive pounding drum beat by John Bonham recorded in a three-story stairwell, driving guitars and a wailing harmonica, all presumably meant to symbolize the relentless storm that threatens to break the levee, backing a powerful vocal performance by Robert Plant. The vocals were processed differently on each verse, sometimes with phasing added.
According to Page, the song's structure "was a riff that I'd been working on, but Bonzo's drum sound really makes a difference on that point." The famous drum performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns by placing Bonham and a new drumkit at the bottom of a stairwell at Headley Grange, and recording it using two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones at the top, giving the distinctive resonant but slightly muffled sound. Back in the Rolling Stones' mobile studio, Johns compressed the drum sound through two channels and added echo through guitarist Jimmy Page's Binson echo unit. The performance was made on a brand new drum kit that had only just been delivered from the factory. The drum break has long been popular in hip hop and dance music circles for its "heavy" sound, and has been sampled for many tracks. At one time the remaining band members took legal action against Beastie Boys for their use of this drum sample on "Rhymin & Stealin" from Licensed to Ill.
Page recorded Plant's harmonica part using the backward echo technique, putting the echo ahead of the sound when mixing, creating a distinct effect.
The song was recorded at a different tempo, then slowed down. Plant then sang in the sort-of-in-between key the song was now in (approximately F minor), which explains its sort of flat and sludgy sound, particularly on the harmonica and guitar solos. Because this song was heavily produced in the studio, it was difficult to recreate live. The band only played this song a few times in the early stages of their 1975 U.S. Tour.
This song was the only one on the album that was not remixed after a supposedly disastrous mixing job in the US (the rest of the tracks were mixed again in England). The original mixing done on this song was kept in its original form.
In the May 2008 issue of Uncut Magazine, Page elaborated upon the effects at the end of the song:
In another interview, Page commented:
Other versions
Several other artists have covered the song or played it live:
- Page and Plant had performed it on their MTV Unplugged appearance and their 1995-96 world tour, swapping it with "Nobody's Fault but Mine" at times. John Paul Jones worked the song into the tour for his two solo albums.
- With Plant playing guitar along with T-Bone Burnett's band, Alison Krauss sang it for the CMT Crossroads TV special starring Plant and Krauss, to promote their album Raising Sand.
- Robert Plant and Alison Krauss regularly covered the song during their tour of USA and Europe in April and May 2008.
- Led Zeppelin parody cover band Dread Zeppelin covered it on 5,000,000.
- Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker used the introduction to the song in his drum solo melody on their 2004 world tour.
- The London Philharmonic Orchestra performed a version of the Led Zeppelin cover on the CD Kashmir: Symphonic Led Zeppelin in 1997.
- Del Rey released a 2006 CD of the same name, which has the song on it.
- Judge covered it on the CD edition of their EP There Will Be Quiet... in 1990.
- W.A.S.P. released a version on the bonus disk of The Crimson Idol in 1991.
- John Campbell covered it on his Howlin' Mercy album in 1993.
- Kristin Hersh further developed the guitar parts of the Led Zepplin version with minimalist percussion on her 1994 Your Ghost EP.
- Enigma, sampled the drum beat for their song Return to Innocence in 1994.
- Jeff Buckley covered it on the so-called Rarities from NYC (that contains some songs recorded on tape and never released) in 1996.
- Rosetta Stone covered it on the album An Eye For The Main Chance in 1991.
- Leftover Salmon did a version on the Ask the Fish live album in 1995. According to Jimmy Page, he is the one who set up and recorded the drum sound from this song.
- Tori Amos played it on her 2005 world tour, at a concert in Austin, TX just days after the hurricane on September 2, 2005.
- Gov't Mule has been playing it in concert since 2005.
- A Perfect Circle included a version on their cover album eMOTIVe in 2004. There were few changes in lyrics but the melody was very different from Led Zeppelin's version.
- Albert Kuvezin and Yat-Kha included it on in their cover album Re-Covers in 2005.
- At the beginning of Temptation by The Tea Party, there is a sped-up drum solo at the beginning. When slowed down, it is not unlike the beginning of When the Levee Breaks.
- Stream of Passion as b-side on their single Out in the Real World and on their live album/DVD Live In The Real World, both in 2006.
- Film score composer John Powell on the soundtrack to the 2006 film Ice Age: The Meltdown.
- Bob Dylan's song "The Levee's Gonna Break" on the 2006 album Modern Times is loosely based on the song.
- New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore's 2006 solo effort entitled III, as the song's subject has been compared to the effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans; it is also the main theme for the event.
- Marcelo Nova, a Brazilian singer, covered in the 2001 album Tijolo na Vidraça.
- New Orleans native jam band Galactic did a version containing no words, which became a regular rotation in their sets post-Katrina.
- Joe Bonamassa uses the songs main riff for his song The River.
- Kid Rock and his band covered it in his pre fame days in concert in the middle of Prodigal Son which sampled the drum beat to the song.
- Killdozer did a version in 1995 on We Will Crush You and performed the song live in 1997 on The Last Waltz.
- Dr. Dre sampled the drum beat of "When the Levee Breaks" for the song "Lyrical Gangbang" on his 1992 album The Chronic
- Down covers the song during their session on the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show, done in 2008. The song is played mostly faithful to the Zeppelin version, although it is not arranged completely the same, and there is an extra riff added to the end of the song.
- German happy hardcore act Dune has included the opening drum beat in one of their "live" remixes of Hardcore Vibes.
Sources
- Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused: The Stories Behind Every Song, by Chris Welch, ISBN 1-56025-818-7
- The Complete Guide to the Music of Led Zeppelin, by Dave Lewis, ISBN 0-7119-3528-9
External links
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