In 1971, Led Zeppelin released their unnamed fourth album (hereafter IV), awash in a mix of blues, Tolkien references, hippie rhetoric and a stairway to heaven. Despite the band's reputation as a phallocentric force of nature, the album features two notable female voices: Sandy Denny on ‘The Battle of Evermore’ and Memphis Minnie's co-songwriting credit for ‘When the Levee Breaks’. What does it mean for Zeppelin's IV, frequently rated the ‘greatest heavy metal album of all time’ (Waksman Reference Waksman2001, p. 276) that it not only featured one of the leading female voices of the electric folk scene, but that its iconic closing track is attributed to a black, female musician? Given the preoccupation with gender and the music of Led Zeppelin, as found in the work of such scholars as Susan Fast and Steve Waksman, it is surprising that these women have not been given their due as significant agents in the history of the band.Footnote 1
The presence of these two women, one singing and one silent, calls for a discussion of the links between gender, soundscape and even landscape. Richard Middleton notes through his reading of popular music and Lacan, ‘the pac(ss)ification of nature is most obviously engineered through the fantasy of Woman’, and the turn to these two women holds elements of fear and desire, as we shall see, with both songs describing landscape through music and lyrics (Middleton 2006, p. 27). As I will explore in this article, these elements reflect a need for musical and spiritual transport whose cultural context was tied to the changing political and cultural status of post-imperial Britain. This sense of transport and adventure appears to be a primary, if not the primary, feature of the band's recordings, whether in Jimmy Page's explosive musical gestures, John Bonham's sprawling drum solos, John Paul Jones's bass lines weaving through the musical texture or Robert Plant's reverb-drenched wails. The band's well-advertised hedonism and their whirlwind touring schedule all projected a further sense of restlessness to listeners, while song titles and place names emphasised a need to wander and explore. Albums became travelogues that wound their way through an amalgamation of Anglo-Saxon pastoralism, Tolkien mythology, an exotic East, hippie culture and the American South. Album sleeves offered up evocative images to emphasise Zeppelin's status as a ‘traveller of both time and space’. As Erik Davis puts it, ‘What their exoticism evokes … [is] not the place but the flight to the place, a movement of the imagination at least as much as the body that travels … an imagination that finds itself in transport’ (emphasis his; Davis Reference Davis2005, p. 142). This desire for adventure or nostalgic escape into distant realms shared significant ties to the shifts taking place in late-1960s to early-1970s Britain, and it would be equally appropriate to describe the band as explorers of gender and geography accessed through their musical soundscapes. Entwined with this sense of elsewhere and when, Zeppelin's landscapes and their accompanying sound worlds rely on gendered senses of space and place.
The female presence of Sandy Denny and Memphis Minnie yields two very different soundscapes and two very different geographic bodies whose femininities create a post-imperial merger between the pastoral images of a white Celtic Britain under siege and a dark world in the Deep South of the USA. In the fantasy world of ‘The Battle of Evermore’, Plant's male traveller submits to the so-called Queen of Light, surrounded by mandolins and acoustic guitar. Plant's travelling persona submits again on the album in ‘When the Levee Breaks’, this time to the power of the flood that drags him down into its watery embrace. This intersection between an acoustic duet and an electric blues rock number displays fantasies of an idealised white, Anglo-Saxon past and a tale of sex and adventure in the land of the dark, foreign Other. In both fantasy spaces, participants are able to achieve close harmony with the earth.
The juxtaposition between the female artists and the feminisation of land and nation is particularly intriguing for a band fixated on restless adventuring and for how such constructions speak to the cultural attitudes and politics of a post-imperial nation. As Britain's empire slipped away, these soundscapes’ nostalgic longing for the adventure narratives promoted in colonial fiction or in Plant's frequent references to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings take on a new light, as I will show. This nostalgia raises questions about how the changing idea of Britain itself contributed to the popularity of folk and blues, particularly here in Led Zeppelin's fantasies of ancient Britain and a corresponding Deep South – fantasies that captivated artists and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Publications on music geographies often include the study of music scenes, locations associated with particular genres, and a focus on the sociology and ethnography related to identity formation among subcultures and minority groups. My own approach, however, aligns with Nicola Dibben's ‘Nature and Nation: National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary’, in which she analyses the relationship between music, environmentalism, and Icelandic citizens’ ‘conflation of nation and nature’ (Dibben Reference Dibben2009, p. 131). Dibben's discussion of an Icelandic postcolonial identity makes her study particularly useful when exploring Zeppelin's musical milieu in the context of a post-imperial Britain. Where Dibben focuses much of her analysis on the visual components of music video, my interests lie primarily with albums. Like her, that interest seeks a deeper understanding of the politicised notions of landscape and soundscape that lie, respectively, in iconography and album recordings. With regard to Led Zeppelin, my focus involves an effort to tease out the cultural resonances that speak through the fascination with a foreign space and an ancient British landscape. To gain a better sense of the songs’ undertones, it is first necessary to describe their timeliness in relation to the politics of the era.
Decolonisation and a lost golden age
Embarrassed after the 1956 Suez crisis – a conflict decided as much by the USA's economic sanctions as by Russia's threats of long-range missile strikes against the UK – Britain was forced to accept that its role as a world power had been diminished. Decolonisation throughout the 1950s and 1960s, immigration from non-white New Commonwealth nations and a counterculture revolt over Britain's decision to develop its own hydrogen bomb were each important political issues of the day. As Bill Schwartz has pointed out, ‘Empire was never an entirely external process to Britain, and nor was decolonization’ (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2011, p. 5). He continues, ‘As decolonization progressed, black migration to the metropole functioned as the trigger which released and organised new memories of empire’ (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2011, p. 10). Birmingham, the home city of both Robert Plant and John Bonham, was shaped by the industrial factories and post-war destruction that littered its landscape, and it served as a key player in the immigration debates dominating Britain throughout the 1960s. Indeed, Birmingham was the city where politician Enoch Powell ignited a political firestorm with his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, provoking white listeners with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Claiming that white Britain and its traditional heritage were under attack, Powell suggested that a race war was imminent, disregarding that, even with an accelerated pace in immigration, the non-white population of Great Britain had only grown from 5 to 6.5% in the decade leading up to the 1971 census (Lomas Reference Lomas1973, p. 23). Britain's loss of power and prestige fed this paranoia.
Jimmy Page ensured that Led Zeppelin held a curious political position. Page was often the spokesperson of the band, and the guitarist shied away or outright disavowed any suggestion that their music was political. Interviews resulted in quotes such as ‘we're musicians not politicians’ (Cabot Reference Cabot1972) or ‘We are not going out to make any kind of moral or political statement. Our music is simply us’ (Record Mirror, 1970; quoted in Fast Reference Fast2001, p. 60).
IV’s album artwork seemed to belie an apolitical position, however. The cover artwork of a man bent under his load of sticks and leering at the viewer opens up to reveal a shocking shift from the green pastoral image to a desolate urban landscape, a juxtaposition that has long fascinated scholars (Walser Reference Walser1993, p. 158; Davis Reference Davis2005, pp. 26–9). What makes this artistic choice particularly striking is the front-to-back cover spread dominated by a photograph of the Butterfield Court tower block in the Black Country town of Dudley, whose 20 storeys can, as Rob Young puts it, ‘on a clear day, be seen thirty or forty miles away, from the tranquil meadows of Worcestershire and Shropshire: an ever-present symbol of urban encroachment’ (Young Reference Young2011, p. 405). The album cover's juxtaposition certainly makes a political statement, and not a particularly subtle one, by placing the man with sticks in his mystic country setting against the depressing backdrop of the tower and a crumbling wall papered in a torn and faded leaf pattern. As Page described it:
Now, on the last record, the sleeve has a lot of meaning. The old man carrying the wood is in harmony with nature. He takes from nature and he gives back to the land. It's a natural cycle – it's right. His old cottage got pulled down and they put him in these urban slums, old slums – terrible places … At least as musicians we aren't doing any environmental or moral damage. In fact musicians can ask some of the ugly questions that politicians don't want to answer. We're not trying to indoctrinate anybody. (Foot Reference Foot1972, p. 24)
Despite Page's protestations that the band did no environmental damage, according to Kyle Devine the creation of vinyl records did indeed generate environmental damage, and the large rigs that carried the band's equipment to gigs provided their own level of pollution (Devine Reference Devine2015). Led Zeppelin's air of mystery encouraged such contrary readings, where conservative idealisation of the past rubbed up against young liberal politics through mysticism and the hippie culture's pro-environmentalist and anti-industrialisation stance. With past glories unravelling and the future uncertain, the changing face of Britain helped to spur the desire to escape into past versions of British identity. To return again to Richard Middleton and a Lacanian viewpoint, to escape into nostalgia allows ‘the fantasy scene [to function] as a repetitive image, protecting the subject from trauma’, a trauma that for Lacan ultimately meant castration, and for Britain meant losing its stance as a world leader and cohesive body as an Empire (Middleton Reference Middleton2006, p. 53), for loss breeds nostalgia and an escape back into what has been fractured. This fracture one can clearly see in the cover artwork to IV, which mixes a melancholy or mysterious past with the new.
This nostalgia was part of a larger movement in British literature, film and music that looked to a lost ‘Golden Age’, be it Tudor England or a mythic Anglo-Saxon world, blending the hippie values of living closer to the earth with the conservative implications of an exclusively white British heritage. This impulse at large seems to have been roused by a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the modern world and Britain's place in it. As David Munrow, a pioneer of England's 1960s early music movement put it, ‘After two world wars, we're not keen on looking into the future. We prefer to look back at what, superficially at any rate, look like brighter and simpler times’ (Young Reference Young2011, p. 203). Even for those musicians who wanted a modern connection to the past, as in the electric folk and blues rock scenes, there was an impulse to turn to this sense of tradition or heritage, located in a place of adventure accessed through the imagination. As Meredith Veldman explains in her Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain:
To the surprise of some observers, particularly those familiar with Tolkien's political and social conservatism, the horns of Elfland harmonized well with the folk music, political chants, and rock rhythms of the culture of protest that emerged in the 1960s … [C.S.] Lewis and Tolkien's fantasies reveal the power of the cultural symbol of the countryside and the integral role of ruralism in shaping the middle-class British cultural identity. (Veldman Reference Veldman1994, pp. 107, 113)
This also held true for American audiences, and others abroad, where Zeppelin's allure of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon heritage was tinged with an added layer of exoticism.
Plant was known for inserting Tolkien references into songs, to the delight of both Zeppelin and Tolkien enthusiasts. However, as Edward Macan notes, ‘Fantasy landscapes and medieval or Eastern imagery [in music] came to represent the idealised society – close to the earth, based on mutual dependence and a strong sense of community, linked with the past – to which the hippies aspired’ (Macan Reference Macan1997, p. 73). ‘The Battle of Evermore’ encapsulates the imaginary geography of a space and place that celebrates a British-centric pastoralism and rejected the realities of the physical and political landscapes of the British nation.
‘Bring it back’
‘The Battle of Evermore’ launched the band into uncharted territory. Through the partnership of Robert Plant's vocals with that of Sandy Denny, the Grande Dame of the British folk music scene, ‘The Battle of Evermore’ extends the story-ballad style of the previous album's ‘Gallows Pole’ into a responsory duet. Denny's guest appearance was doubly significant in that it was not only the sole invitation – through all of the band's nine studio albums – for an artist to join the band as a guest vocalist, but also the only time Plant interacted with an actual woman on a Led Zeppelin record. As Susan Fast notes, hard rock and metal bands are ‘least likely to allow outsiders in; they are most concerned with establishing a kind of closed society in which the fraternal bonds between band members are firmly established and maintained’ (Fast Reference Fast and Scott2009, p. 176). Rather than addressing the absent object of his male desire, shadowy figures beholden to his own whims, listeners were offered the opportunity to identify with a female persona through Denny. The singularity of this pairing makes the track particularly important, as she holds equal, if not greater, power than Plant throughout the song.
Alexandra ‘Sandy’ Denny (1947–1978), drawn to British and Irish folk songs from early in her career as a singer on the folk club circuit, auditioned for electric folk group Fairport Convention in 1968 and was embraced as the group's new lead singer. As Britta Sweers describes the band, Fairport Convention ‘achieved the first genuine musical and technical fusion of folk and rock, most obviously on its groundbreaking recording Liege and Lief (1969)’ (Sweers Reference Sweers2005, p. 86). Both Page and Plant adored Liege and Lief, Page commenting in an interview for Zigzag that it was the best album of 1969 (Heylin Reference Heylin2011, p. 136). Before adopting Denny as their singer, Fairport had primarily looked to American musical styles, but Denny introduced the group to her repertory of traditional music. The group ‘not only electrified the old tunes but created a completely new style out of traditional and rock elements’ (Sweers Reference Sweers2005, p. 89). This combination helped launch the electric folk movement, although Denny had already left the band by the time of the album's release, first for a short stint with electric folk group Fotheringay and then transitioning into a solo career.
The popularity of Liege & Lief made Denny a natural choice of collaborator with Led Zeppelin. Musically, it was an apt pairing as well. Describing her goal for Fairport Convention, Denny announced in an NME interview that ‘We're not making it pop … In fact, it will be almost straight [folk]; only electric. What [will] it sound like? Heavy traditional folk music’ (Heylin Reference Heylin2011, p. 101). Indeed, fans showed their support for Denny's musical choices by voting her Top Female Vocalist in the 1970 annual Melody Maker poll. Readers voted Robert Plant as Top Male Vocalist that same year, the year that Led Zeppelin released III and debuted the band's own experiment with pairing both ‘heavy’ and folk aesthetics. Denny was voted Top Female Vocalist again in 1971, despite the commercial failure of her solo debut. Her biographer has suggested that this accolade came ‘seemingly on the back of a single vocal duet on a certain chart-topping album’ (Heylin Reference Heylin2011, p. 141); if that were indeed the case, it would be a powerful testament to the song's popularity and to the power of her performance in particular.
Denny's voice on ‘The Battle of Evermore’ has an easy, clear tone, while in contrast the forward resonance in Plant's vocal placement gives his voice a pointed, sharper quality. They were then able to sing in the same range, to weave their voices together in chromatic harmonisation, while also maintaining their unique characteristics. Denny's lyrics are in the imperative tense; the pushed quality of Plant's voice give his lines a sense of desperation. Denny's Queen of Light takes up her bow to defend the land, commanding the listener to ‘throw down your plow and hoe’ and to ‘take up your swords and fly’ alongside her. The sinuous sliding and rubbing of their duet, the emphasis on chromaticism, and Denny's vocal ornamentations all create a sense of exoticism that transports the song to a very different space than the fantasies of earlier Zeppelin recordings.
Through its title alone, ‘The Battle of Evermore’ conveys the importance of time and atmosphere within the track. Silence stretches during a slow fade-in that lasts a little over 30 seconds and begins with sounds so muted as to be almost imperceptible. The equally long fade-out that closes the song creates a controlled symmetry through Page's studio manipulations. Preceded on the album by the blazing ‘Rock and Roll’, the nebulous sonic frame of ‘The Battle of Evermore’ transports the listener into a haunting medieval epic, one that seemingly exists outside of time. ‘The Battle of Evermore’ then bridges into the epic ‘Stairway to Heaven’, both musically, in its acoustic instrumentation, and lyrically, in its fantasy references. Commenting on the musical semiotics of the ‘archaic and bittersweet’ sounds of the recorders in ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Robert Walser notes that Zeppelin's images ‘seem not to have any historical coherence, but they are all available in the present as sources of power and mystery’ (Walser Reference Walser1993, p. 158). The point applies just as well to ‘The Battle of Evermore’: the two mandolins continuously play in a high range with no grounded support from the acoustic guitar or voices, creating the effect that they hang suspended in space. In Page's technologically adept hands, their sound transforms into that of lapping waves, each reiterating its own related riff before briefly coming together on a single pitch before drawing apart. His addition of reverb and adjustments in timing make the two sound slightly out of phase, enhancing the effect that the audience has entered into a transcendent moment of mystic time. Below these, a third mandolin slowly descends in a chromatic line; its lower range, chromatic motion and glacial pace create an inexorable pull, while the echoing space between the mandolins continues to build on the sense that this imaginary geography lies in an ancient past.
Post-imperial blues
‘When the Levee Breaks’ coalesces through a mixture of signifiers representing sexual desire and geographical conquest. Its fantasy of a chaotic, flooding force whose dark body washes over a mysterious landscape links the mythic, pastoral Britain of ‘The Battle of Evermore’ with a palpable historic Southern trauma.
Both Page and Plant were well-versed in the blues, and Led Zeppelin's albums incorporated material from established blues artists including Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. Plant filled the band's sprawling live improvisations with lyrics strewn with phrases from the blues repertoire. Verses and phrases were mixed and matched in the style of traditional blues performances, although entire sections were likewise lifted from earlier artists’ songs with neither credit nor compensation. These gestures to the blues tradition frequently drew negative comments from critics who viewed the group's references as ‘rip-offs’ or signs of unoriginality rather than the ‘reworkings’ advocated by Dave Headlam (Headlam Reference Headlam, Marvin and Hermann1995, p. 326).
The politics surrounding authorship and traditional expectations of originality in rock and roll were often complicated when it came to the blues and their adaptations into blues rock during this era. As one blues harmonica manual published in London advised, a player should ‘absorb, ingest, osmosise, steal, borrow, gulp, grip and gargle what you need from various styles to help you say your own thing’. Issues of racial and musical appropriation from the blues repertoire were grudgingly raised by its author and dismissed with the opinion that ‘music is like the air – it should belong to everybody’ (Glover Reference Glover1971, pp. 49, 69). The members of Led Zeppelin continuously justified their borrowings in such a way, either with Jimmy Page's problematic protestations that the original songs were so altered as to be brand new, or by defensively describing the borrowing as an authentic mode of blues song construction. In a rare and intriguing case of acknowledging authorship by an earlier blues artist, the band bestowed a co-songwriting credit upon blues guitarist and singer Memphis Minnie for their blues rock epic, ‘When the Levee Breaks’.
Born Lizzie ‘Kid’ Douglas (1897–1973), Memphis Minnie had toured the Southern USA as a blues guitar act with the Ringling Brothers Circus before making a highly successful recording for Columbia Records with her then husband, Kansas Joe McCoy. ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1929), a song referencing the great Mississippi flood of 1927, was one of the first sides released from their recording session and featured Kansas Joe singing and playing rhythm guitar while Memphis Minnie took the solos. Memphis Minnie went on to be both singer and guitar soloist on several of her future recordings and had two particularly well-circulated hits with ‘Bumble Bee’ (1930) and ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’ (1941). At that moment in her career, she was considered one of the best guitarists on the blues circuit and, after moving to Chicago, was one of the first to make the switch to electric guitar. Anecdotes and biographies of Minnie frequently use masculine attributes to describe her personality and guitar virtuosity. These emphasise not only that her virtuosity sprang from her ability to ‘play like a man’, but also include descriptions of drinking, gambling and fighting, as well as winning guitar duels with Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters (Garon and Garon Reference Garon and Garon1992, pp. 86–7). A remarkable piece by Langston Hughes for the Chicago Defender described her exceptionally ‘hard and strong’ voice, concluding that ‘Memphis Minnie's music is harder than the coins that roll across the counter’ (Hughes Reference Hughes and Tracy1999, pp. 321–2).
Like many blues artists, her popularity extended across the Atlantic when the blues explosion rocked the UK during the 1960s. Although she never toured the UK, Memphis Minnie's music had a tangible presence within the blues and blues-influenced scenes. Besides record imports from the States, the primary avenue for her music to reach Britain was through her inclusion in Paul Oliver's (Reference Oliver1960) foundational blues history, Blues Fell This Morning; Plant allegedly raided the book and its discography with zeal in order to become familiar with artists and to then acquire recordings of their works (Welch Reference Welch1998, p. 72). Oliver's book provided historical details of African American life in the South, including information on the building and maintenance of levees and accounts of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The section pertaining to the flood included a transcription of the lyrics to ‘When the Levee Breaks’; here the song was attributed solely to Kansas Joe within the text and makes no mention of Memphis Minnie, although the book's discography lists both artists as performers of the song. Several mentions of Memphis Minnie's compositions are scattered throughout the volume, including her songs about boxer Joe Lewis and a transcription of the lyrics to ‘In My Girlish Days’, ‘When You Love Me’ and ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’. Of primary importance was the LP anthology that accompanied Oliver's book, which featured several of the performers Oliver mentioned, including Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie's recording of ‘When the Levee Breaks’.Footnote 2
Interest in Minnie began to grow in the 1960s, exemplified by Pete Moody's 1968 self-published biography Memphis Minnie: The Life and Recording History of the Female Country Blues Singer and his founding of Sunflower Records to distribute her collected recordings alongside the biography. As Memphis Minnie's fan base grew, attention was drawn to her life of poverty in a Louisiana nursing home. Jo Ann Kelly, a prominent British blues singer and club owner who frequently covered Memphis Minnie's works, organised a benefit for the singer in 1968. Her cause gained high-profile coverage in British blues magazines, which likewise encouraged fans to send money directly to Minnie and her sister, Daisy Douglas. Influential British blues writer Mike Leadbitter continued the exposure of Memphis Minnie's work with a Blues Unlimited feature titled ‘My Girlish Days’ in December Reference Leadbitter1970, the same month that Led Zeppelin recorded their cover version of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ at Headley Grange. Daisy Douglas responded to this feature on behalf of her sister with a letter of thanks in the magazine's June 1971 issue, published only a few months prior to the November release of Led Zeppelin's album. It may well be this general awareness, as much as any altruistic or sympathetic homage to the singer/guitarist, that prompted the band to give her a writing credit in an attempt to avoid being charged with a ‘lack of originality, or even worse, a lack of authenticity’ (Headlam Reference Headlam, Marvin and Hermann1995, p. 314). This explanation would, perhaps, also account for the credit going solely to Memphis Minnie with no mention of Kansas Joe, who had died in 1950.
Led Zeppelin's cover of Memphis Minnie's song, her fans’ investment in her recordings and her championing by both the British blues press and female artists all complicate the traditional narrative of British blues history, wherein ‘women could not be acknowledged at all in the canon’, in order to ensure an ‘unassailable virile form of masculinity to British rockers’.Footnote 3 Or to quote Simon Frith and Howard Horne, ‘To take music “seriously”, from rhythm clubs to rhythm ‘n’ blues, was to be a man; to giggle and scream and sigh was to be a woman’ (Frith and Horne Reference Frith and Horne1987, p. 92). Scholarly emphasis on phallocentric appropriation of black masculinity by British white male performers tends to ignore the female presence in the British blues scene, whether in recordings, as performers, as organisers or as audience members. Although Led Zeppelin's style stresses an overwhelmingly sexualised version of musical performance, particularly in the blues covers, the band's stature as quintessential ‘cock rock’ musicians deserves a much more complex reading of gender positioning and displays of desire than is usually admitted outside of the work of Susan Fast.
Led Zeppelin rarely gave interviews, and, outside of live shows or television appearances, it was the albums themselves that communicated the group's interests to its audience. Although many of Led Zeppelin's fans would probably have been unfamiliar with her work, the inclusion of Memphis Minnie's name alone on the album was a powerful symbol of female authorship and indicated a measure of respect from the band in covering her song. Moreover, as Middleton notes, the allure of the blues revival remained so strong because ‘the past is conjured up, brought into the present, reconfigured … At the same time, this past is a “folk” past: what is conjured up is “tradition,” a home that has been lost’ (Middleton 2006, p. 41). This lost home applies to Led Zeppelin's nostalgic desire to be lost in the Deep South – to be lost in the blues. Moreover, there are links between ‘(irrational) love, blackness, and Nature’ that cannot be ignored in Led Zeppelin's homage to Memphis Minnie and the Deep South (Middleton 2006, p. 67).
Within the established scholarly narrative of Led Zeppelin's career, Memphis Minnie's presence on IV frustrates the definition of Led Zeppelin's music as by, of and for men alone. Her inclusion has provoked responses ranging from mystified questioning of the band's agenda in choosing to cover a black female songwriter to various attempts to force the song back into the confines of heterosexual and homosocial masculinity, as is the case with Simon Reynolds's and Joy Press's critique:
There are even a couple of rock songs about dams bursting – one of the central phobic metaphors of the proto-fascist imagination. The most famous is ‘When the Levee Breaks’ by Led Zeppelin, a band whose hyper-phallic bombast and Viking/Tolkienesque warrior obsessions were attacked by many critics at the time as proto-fascist. The song is an old blues classic which Zeppelin inflated into a tour de force of Doomsday boogie. Why Plant and Co identified with the scenario (a real threat to the black farmers who originally heard the song), we can only guess. But women often loom as a demonic threat in Led Zeppelin's songs (‘Dazed and Confused’, ‘Black Dog’ et al.). Is ‘When the Levee Breaks’ a sort of allegory of this fear of feminine engulfment, elevated to a histrionic pitch of cosmic dread? (Reynolds and Press Reference Reynolds and Press1995, p. 96)
Susan Fast views their interpretation of the song as a symptom of homosocial male phobia to be a gross oversimplification, but likewise seems slightly puzzled over why the band would be drawn to the song, other than as one more historicised fantasy expedition in the band's repertoire:
The lyrics to ‘Levee’ … refer to a person desperate about leaving home to find work elsewhere. The only references to this person's partner (the sex of either is not identified) speak of anguish at having to leave a ‘happy home’ and ‘baby’, about not being able to take ‘baby’ with him or her. If anything, the lyric relates the person's perceived impotency in the face of economic hardship – at the prospect of losing his or her sense of place and culture in order to go to Chicago to find work because of hard times. Reynolds and Press do not tell us, specifically, where or how the ‘fear of feminine engulfment’ occurs in the song: what one could accuse Zeppelin of is appropriating a lyrical scenario utterly removed from their own experience (and Reynolds and Press rightly question why Zeppelin identified with such a scenario). (Fast Reference Fast2001, p. 165)
A further reading by Dave Headlam investigates the song's musical structure in relation to the Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie original. His brief consideration of the song's subject appears only with regard to the duo's original, leaning towards the text as either a historical record or as a cliché for romantic woes:
[T]he subject is the Mississippi flood of 1927, when the river flooded over the levees and homes were destroyed. The levee breaking is also a metaphor for the breaking up of a relationship, where the rain symbolizes trouble, falling, or crying. The narrator sits on the levee and tries to hold the water back, or tries to hold the relationship together, but to no avail. (Headlam Reference Headlam, Marvin and Hermann1995, p. 354)
By the time these narratives have filtered down to biographical writing aimed at the average Zeppelin consumer, Memphis Minnie is mentioned solely as evidence of the band's familiarity with the blues. The song's subject has been equally distilled; Chris Welch's overheated description resembles a colonialist jungle fantasy with descriptions of ‘sexual desires giving way to a sustained physical onslaught’, as its ‘spluttering, shimmering bottleneck guitars and wailing harmonica suggest the humid heat of the Deep South’ (Welch Reference Welch1998, p. 72). To a certain degree, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ reflects elements from all of these descriptions, whether sexual engulfment or as the symbol for an unmoored sense of place in the world. Indeed, the song's social relevance is bound up precisely in a British colonialist imagination where its frightening, yet alluring, female sexuality is described in terms of a dark, mysterious and overwhelming natural force.
The lyrics of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ describe an exotic and humid fantasy space that awaits Led Zeppelin's eager traveller, partaking in what Anne McClintock describes as ‘a long tradition of male travels as an erotics of ravishment’ (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, p. 22). Where Steve Waksman adapts this view to unpack colonialist expressions of the East in Led Zeppelin's music, McClintock's particular point was that Africa and the Americas had been interrelated in the European mind for centuries as sites of sexual freedom and perversion. McClintock eloquently describes how ‘long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what could be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination – a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears’ (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, p. 22). White British blues players of this era could, in essence, become the colonial explorers or tourists of an imaginary Deep South. Narratives taking place in this mysterious world relied on the descriptive imagery found within blues songs or on the travelogues published by fellow enthusiasts who had visited this faraway land of the blues. Their information and depictions were central to inflaming the imaginations of their readers every bit as much as past Europeans had hung on the writings of early adventurers.
Although it was a slim volume, even the previously mentioned blues harmonica manual included an annotated bibliography that encouraged further readings to understand the ‘overall blues scene’. Its white American author, Tony ‘Little Sun’ Glover, gives a description of Frederic Ramsey Jr's Been Here and Gone. His comments illustrate the investment white enthusiasts had in a romanticised mental landscape of the blues, and a premium is placed on evocative images rather than on a factual description of living conditions in the South:
This is largely a photographic essay of the Negro south and the land of the blues. The text is sometimes awkward, but the many excellent pictures are worth more than several thousand words (to coin a phrase). This book is almost a poem in pictures and beautifully illustrates the places that gave birth to the blues, and the almost anonymous people who gave them life. (Glover Reference Glover1971, p. 67)
Those who purchased and ingested such travelogue material could create an armchair fantasy of life in the south. For players such as Eric Clapton, his fantasies of ‘being a Chicago bluesman, driving around in a Cadillac and living the life’ could be indulged, although he eventually admitted that this was a grossly willful misreading of black experience (Waksman Reference Waksman2001, p. 246). Ramsey fills his blues picture book with escapist language and at one point launches into a description of the South that is barely one step removed from the language of African conquest and jungle adventure:
It [Wilkinson County, Mississippi] serves a territory that is as far removed from the rest of the world as any to be found in the South … When high water comes, any part of them may be washed along with the overflow of Old River Lake into the Mississippi. As with the shanty settlements beneath levees upriver, the lowlands are not so much claimed by any specific owners, as inhabited by adventurers, hunters and self-made outcasts, who prefer this life of impermanence to anything offered on higher ground. (Ramsey Jr Reference Ramsey1960, pp. 121–2)
Read as a colonialist narrative, African Americans have become the native peoples with their songs and albums serving as untapped musical riches that can be harvested for the enjoyment of white listeners.
Although the raw material for Led Zeppelin's adaptation of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was probably acquired through Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning, the lyrics and the song's musical elements are disassembled then reassembled to create an adaptation that speaks to Led Zeppelin's white post-imperial male needs and desires. Where Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie's original song made reference to the trauma of the Great Flood, the musical depiction of watery destruction has been transformed by Led Zeppelin into a new image of sexual, spiritual and environmental cataclysm.
The musical arrangement maintains an affiliation with the blues through instrumentation that includes the standard drums, lead guitar, bass and vocals with the addition of Plant on harmonica and an extra track within the mix for Page's slide guitar. Led Zeppelin's use of these two instruments often stand as signifiers for the South, particularly the slide guitar, which tends to appear on their covers of Delta blues and spirituals such as ‘In My Time of Dying’. For the recording of ‘When the Levee Breaks’, the instruments are placed across from each other on the left and right sides of the recording mix. Rather than engaging in competition or conversation, the two utilise contrasts of texture, volume and pitch range to enhance the sense of two opposing forces. The two sides work to batter away at the sonic structure of the mix before finally breaching its integrity at the close of the song.
The slide guitar's unrelenting three-note riff works particularly well as a musical metaphor for a wave-like sound. The slow rolls and cresting dynamics created with the bottleneck slide imitate an obsessive gnawing as the intervals of its four-pitch series circle downward three times before cresting upwards. Its unending groove continuously rubs and wears against the middle-ground island of the mix where Plant's voice has been placed. John Paul Jones's bass line joins in on this riff though he is allowed to vary it by moving to surrounding pitches. The two instruments’ relatively lower dynamics and pitch range form the left side of the audio spectrum in the mix, while the higher, breath-driven instrument of the harmonica and the soaring lead guitar join together on the right side of the mix.
The harmonica and the lead guitar track create a higher-pitched, rhythmically varied force. Against the steady groove of the slide guitar and bass, the harmonica ranges across the melodic scale at will. The wild, improvisatory gestures become a blustery embodiment of chaos that contrasts with the steady groove. Once laid down in the recording studio, a range of effects could be applied to the track. A defining aspect of the recording is its striking, otherworldly sound of backward echo applied to the harmonica and later to the lead guitar. Page explained that he had discovered the technique while mixing The Yardbirds’ ‘Ten Little Indians’. As he described it, the sound involves ‘reversing the tape, recording the echo, and then putting it round the right way again so that the echo would precede the signal’ (Davis Reference Davis2005, p. 163). The shivering sound of the harmonica alternates between bends and wails. Ghostly reverberations ping back and forth, a technique that seems to destabilise the very time and space of the sound as it bounces against itself from 3:25 to 3:56. The lead guitar replaces the harmonica's monologue during the choruses by springing out of the audio texture with a piercing tone placed far forward in the mix, and in the densest moments of the soundscape's disintegration it adopts the harmonica's backwards echo to further unbalance the established order of the sound [6:20].
The giant, reverberant sounds of John Bonham's drums form the backbone of the track and are traditionally regarded as the primary element of the song. Falling into his own language of conquest, Dave Headlam stresses that this sound ‘stamps the song as the band's own’ (Headlam Reference Headlam, Marvin and Hermann1995, p. 358). The process involved in recording its vast thumps is perhaps the most frequently mentioned anecdote regarding Page's recording skills. Erik Davis describes the setup:
For the session, Bonham placed his new kit on the floor of a large open stone stairwell … Two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics were then strung up on the two landings above, ten and twenty feet overhead, and then run through a guitar echo unit … [The] set-up was heresy: room mics were never used to record drums, and the team didn't even mic the bass drum. (Davis Reference Davis2005, p. 74)
The drums’ echoing sounds generate an audio link between the harmonica and slide guitar as signifiers of the Deep South and a colonialist Africa. As Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow articulated in 1970, ‘Of all the arts, African drumming seems to have most captured the imagination of the British writers … They have transmuted the sound of the drums into the voice of Africa itself’ (Hammond and Jablow Reference Hammond and Jablow1970, pp. 141–2). ‘When the Levee Breaks’ takes part in this conflation of the South with the Dark Continent. The lone, echoing sound of Bonham's drumming opens the track with a deep, throbbing pulse whose violent attack centres the song within a distant, wild space.
Stranded in the mix between the left side's wave-like groove and the right side's howling winds, Plant's voice resides on an island in the centre that bridges the song's oppositional forces. The position of the voice moves up and down in volume and correspondingly closer and farther away from the listener's perspective. This effect places him in the midst of swirling engulfment as he sings the phrase ‘Going down, going down now, going down …’. The surrounding musical material has also become completely unmoored by this point. Estranged in the midst of audio chaos, the voice is further distanced when supplanted by the instruments panning between the two sides of the audio spectrum, treated to their own layers of distortion and audio effects. The instruments pan around and overpower the singer, crashing through their established barriers, and leaving the listener equally trapped in the middle of the mix as the progressively muddier sounds warp and distort.
The mesmerising motion of the special effects in ‘When the Levee Breaks’ are fascinating when read in the context of Peter Doyle's theories on the implications of recording effects such as echo:
[The] persona that speaks from the reverberant space possesses a special charisma, has been touched by a god, may have special powers over the opposite sex, or may be able to cast spells … The up-front voice and distant guitar sound hints at shamanistic powers over space and matter, or perhaps the ‘teleporting’ of sci-fi literature, or the telekinesis of New Age lore. (Doyle Reference Doyle2005, p. 173)
Although he was referring to blues recordings in general and not Zeppelin in particular, such a description would likely have delighted Page. Such language finds its apotheosis in Led Zeppelin with Page and Plant's combined interest in mythology, the undoubtedly charismatic allure the two held for both men and women, and Page's own obsession with the occult. The guitarist's interest in the capabilities of the recording studio parallel his arcane interests through technology's ability to manipulate natural and unnatural forces such as the backwards echo. According to Page, this unusual sound affected the listener by ‘sucking you into the source’, and the imagery of this phrase is evocative on several levels – as a marker of engulfment by a primeval female sexuality, in the context of its echo as a marker of the past, and through the more literal sense of the sonic whirlpool that surrounds the listener throughout the finale (Davis Reference Davis2005, p. 163).
The primacy of the recording studio in the creation of the song was part of the relatively new concept where a track was an end in itself, meant to exist apart from physical performance. In fact, the sonic identity of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is so completely bound up in Page's carefully crafted audio space that a live adaptation would have been impossible. Significantly, the number was never performed live outside of four or fewer run-throughs during the band's 1975 tour (Lewis Reference Lewis2005, pp. 239–41). True, the band had more than enough songs to fill their three-hour-plus live shows, but not enough instruments to play ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and, as Susan Fast notes, the band did not use outside musicians for shows (Fast Reference Fast2001, p. 75). Page surely could have adapted the lines into a single guitar part and improvised whatever connective tissue would be required; the sticking point, however, was that the musical rhetoric of the piece would be utterly destroyed without two separate guitar sounds. ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was replaced in their tour repertoire with the raucous slide guitar sounds of ‘In my Time of Dying’, a blues number where the antiphonal groans and moans of Plant and Page could have free reign to fulfill their standard roles.
Traveller of both time and space
The escapist sense within the band's language and musical aesthetic might have shaped Led Zeppelin's songs, but the cultural moment of contemporary England during the recording of IV was as turbulent as the subject of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’ themselves. The intense cultural insecurity and instability of a post-imperial Britain ran parallel to the enthusiastic adoption of the blues and the interest in electric folk. The panic related to these political and cultural shifts enhanced the sense that the body of Britain itself was disintegrating. Forced through international pressure to withdraw from its colonies, Britain granted a greater degree of autonomy to these nations as part of a new incarnation of the Commonwealth. Closer to home, the vital organs of the UK were out of harmony as Wales and Scotland advocated for greater independence from England, which had traditionally held the reins of power. Northern Ireland and Ireland represented a continual problem that ‘by the seventies, the British state had been trying to forget about … for almost half a century’ (Beckett Reference Beckett2009, p. 97). However, the old conflict of the ‘Troubles’ exploded into violence in the late 1960s with riots culminating in the 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings. This dissent only fanned the paranoid flames that waves of immigrants from its former colonies would overwhelm England itself.Footnote 4 Issues of race and immigration dominated much of the political discourse, although as Mark Donnelly notes:
The issue was not one of overpopulation … Rather, what was at stake was the widespread perception that the flow of immigrants from the New Commonwealth into the UK (running at about 70,000 a year during the ‘bulge’ period of 1965–74) was eroding long-held conceptions of white British national identity. (Donnelly Reference Donnelly2005, p. 112)
In this environment, an escape into the imagination was a thoroughly tantalising prospect and, for Led Zeppelin, the American South and medieval fantasy offered a space far enough from British woes to be desired, idealised and explored. Unlike ‘The Battle of Evermore’, influenced by books filled with ideas of purity, restraint and strong religious overtones, images of the African American South provided a complementary environment where established images of sexuality and uncivilised, non-white hedonism could rule the imagination. In turn, Led Zeppelin's combination of white, Celtic pastoralism and Deep South blues numbers formed an alluring mix.
Although there is a tendency in discussions of Led Zeppelin's music to separate their songs into various categories – blues numbers, those with Tolkien-inspired lyrics and those depicting an imaginary East – it is important to remember that the band marketed their work in a specifically album-centric format rather than through singles, which they conspicuously avoided. In this sense, albums and track listings formed a dialogue between the songs that purposely wedded their various styles. Erik Davis makes a compelling case that Memphis Minnie's inclusion on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ alongside Sandy Denny is part of an essential female trinity that contributes to the album's vague quest narrative and constant theme of travelling, with Joni Mitchell as the inspiration for ‘Going to California’ rounding out the third. The extremely problematic nature of Zeppelin's narrative, however, is that the female figures of this trinity are clearly polarised between white and black. Memphis Minnie and the chaotic sound of black female sexual transcendence are posed against the pure, unattainable white femininity, musically and lyrically represented with Tolkien's Queen of Light in ‘The Battle of Evermore’ and the ‘queen without a king’ of ‘Going to California’.
Each racialised sound becomes defined by a relationship to its counterpart, and ‘When the Levee Breaks’ has its own share of Tolkienesque undertones. Plant's mountain man, or wild man of the woods, has his world rocked by a dark woman of the Deep South in the same kind of geographical juxtaposition that joins New York to Tolkien's Middle Earth on ‘Misty Mountain Hop’, and merges the props of medieval epic with airplanes and the West Coast in ‘Going to California’. There is a fundamental lack of identifiable location in the album, not only in the songs’ geographic sense, but likewise in the album cover's lack of title, its occult symbolism and its mixture of varying time periods and landscapes. This phantasmagoric mixture creates a merger between the pastoral images of Celtic Britain and the American South that equally allows for a merger between Lord of the Rings’ white-centric racial hierarchy and the modern cultural expectations of blackness.
In this fantasy space, the song's participants are unfettered by societal restraints and are able to achieve close harmony with the earth. The musical and historical flood, then, takes on an identity that allows for and encourages this mystical state. Michael D. Harris reminds his readers that white descriptions of blackness associated black women with ‘nature, uncontrolled passion, and promiscuity’. These constructions of blackness were alive and well in British fiction, with African women portrayed as ‘creatures that are all body, without mind or soul’ (Harris Reference Harris2003, p. 96). The body of water and chaos in ‘When the Levee Breaks’ takes on the role of a liberating force in a long tradition of female water imagery in literature. Joseph Boone views this literature as the preserve of male writers who treat the liquid, female body as a ‘displaced arena for fantasies of opening up new possibilities of desire and for fantasies of expanding bodily boundaries’. Any fear related to overpowering femininity has been overridden in this fantasy with the desire for sexual abandon:
The masculine dread of such female-associated flux, however, also contains its inverse: the secret desire to break through the dams that the ego has imposed on the libido and gain access to hitherto restricted territories of pleasure … for, historically it is women's sexuality that has come to stand as symbol both of this forbidden geography and this subversive desire. (Boone Reference Boone1998, pp. 64, 67)
Led Zeppelin's ‘When the Levee Breaks’ ultimately represents neither homosocial nightmare nor despondent lament of lost love, but a subversive, erotic fantasy of submission where white masculinity yields to the sexual domination of a black female force. The breaking of that levee promises rejuvenation, sexual pleasure and perhaps even a rite of passage back to a prelapsarian utopia or harmony with the natural world.
The threatening floodwaters of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ respond to both the fears and desires of its blues-rock creators and listeners. This colonialist fantasy for a post-imperial nation replaces the uncontrolled, libidinous woman of ‘Dark Africa’ with the same cultural stereotypes applied to the Deep South. Her wide, soulless body holds the promise of an uncontrolled sexuality that cannot be found in Tolkien's Queen of Light in ‘The Battle of Evermore’. Symbolising an underworld of watery, female chaos, the whirlpool of her sexual onslaught draws in Led Zeppelin's wild man as surely as does his desire for a green, revitalised land.
