When the Levee Breaks

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When the Levee Breaks
Cover
Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie
publication July 1929
length 3:11
Genre (s) Country blues
Author (s) Kansas Joe McCoy , Minnie Lawlers
Publisher (s) Columbia
Cover version
1971 Led Zeppelin

When the Levee Breaks ( English for "When the levee breaks") is a Blue song by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie from 1929. Sustainable became famous for the song in response to the Mississippi Flood of 1927 was, in rock version of Led Zeppelin (1971), which lives on in a multitude of new recordings and samples .

Original version

Historic levee breach at Mound Landing, Mississippi (1927)

The song is penned by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie , who recorded the song together in 1929 and released it with the B-side That Will Be Alright on Columbia Records , where it sold 6,000 times. Two years earlier, the Great Mississippi Flood had wreaked havoc in and around the state of the same name . The floods destroyed large areas of farmland, forcing many people to leave their homes and head to the Midwest in search of work . The suffering resulting from the natural disaster is dealt with in When the Levee Breaks .

“I worked on the levee, mama both night and day / I ain't got nobody to keep the water away. (...)
It's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan / Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home. "

“I toiled on the dike, mom by day and by night / I have no one to hold off the water. (...)
A mean old dike that makes me cry and moan / I'll leave my treasure and my happy home behind. "

The 12-bar song is in the AAB form that is typical for Bluestitel. In terms of content, the blues song is primarily dedicated to the evacuation of around 13,000 people from the Greenville area into the protection area of ​​a dike. The fear that he will give in is reflected in the text ("If it keeps on raining levee's goin 'to break"). This makes the song one of many Delta Blues numbers with this theme that were written in the years after the flood, including Barbecue Bob's Mississippi Heavy Water Blues (1927) and Charley Patton's High Water Everywhere (1929).

Led Zeppelin version

John Bonham appeared in Earls Court in 1975

Led Zeppelin took the Blues, but changing the text part on and turned it into "a hypnotic blues rock - Mantra ." Her seven-minute interpretation of the song is especially for John Bonham's bombastic drumming known that in a stairwell at Headley Grange in East Hampshire added has been. According to producer and guitarist Jimmy Page , the recording location turned out to be so acoustically balanced that the bass drum did not have to be mixed:

“We were playing in one room in a house with a recording truck, and a drum kit was duly set up in the main hallway, which is a three storey hall with a staircase going up on the inside of it. And when John Bonham went out to play the kit in the hall, I went 'Oh, wait a minute, we gotta do this!' ”

“We played in the room of a house and a studio truck, and a drum kit was set up in the hallway that was connected to a three-story stairwell. When John Bonham went out to play I said, 'Wait, that's how we should record this!' "

In order to simulate the atmosphere of a "drowned world," took Page to different production tricks back, including echo , reverse, harmonica and slow-motion - Playback . Led Zeppelin published their interpretation of the song in 1971 as the last track on their fourth album, which has sold millions of times . Due to the elaborate production, the band rarely played the song live. An early recording (Rough Mix) titled If It Keeps On Raining was released in 2015 on the deluxe edition of Led Zeppelin's latest studio album, Coda . The intro developed into a classic sample that opens , for example, the debut album of the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill (1986).

reception

Already in release of the album was When the Levee Breaks rave reviews. Robert Christgau called the track the real “triumph” of the album and said that Led Zeppelin overcame the “quasi-parodic overstatement” of their blues numbers as if by magic. He mused that the song had the “grandeur of a symphonic crescendo ”, while John Bonham pounded out a “ contrapuntal tattoo heavy rhythm”. Tom Erlewine of Allmusic put the song on a par with Stairway to Heaven and grabbed him as "apocalyptic disk Urban Blues together." Its seismic rhythms and layered dynamics illustrated why Led Zeppelin remained inaccessible to their imitators.

After Led Zeppelin had started late to make their music available for film soundtracks, When the Levee Breaks made it into one or the other movie. These include the action film Sucker Punch (2010) and the Oscar-winning thriller Argo (2012). In 2015, the song accompanied the trailer for the movie The Big Short , which deals with the emergence of the US financial crisis as a result of the real estate bubble . In the context of Hurricane Katrina , the title gained new popularity by appearing in numerous Internet videos as well as being the inspiration for Spike Lee's award-winning documentary When the Levees Broke .

Other versions

Cover versions

Samples

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ As a result, there were numerous other publications of these recordings. Cf. Elizabeth West Marvin & Richard Hermann (Eds.) Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies , Eastman Studies in Music 2002, pp. 353f.
  2. ↑ cf. Elizabeth West Marvin & Richard Hermann Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies , p. 356
  3. ↑ Steve Cheseborough: Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2004, 2nd Edition, pp. 132-133. ISBN 978-1-57806-650-6 (English).
  4. ↑ Paul Gordon & Beth Garon: Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues. Da Capo Press, Boston 1992. ISBN 978-0-306-80460-1 (English).
  5. ↑ cf. also Patrick O'Daniel When the Levee Breaks: Memphis and the Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927 The History Press, 2013, chap. 2
  6. ↑ cf. Elizabeth West Marvin & Richard Hermann Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies , p. 354.
  7. ↑ Mick Wall When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography Of Led Zeppelin 2008
  8. ↑ Guitar Legend Jimmy Page. National Public Radio , June 2, 2003, accessed May 20, 2017 .
  9. ↑ a b The 40 Greatest Led Zeppelin Songs of All Time. Rolling Stone , November 7, 2012, accessed May 20, 2017 .
  10. ↑ The Life of a Song: 'When the Levee Breaks'. Financial Times , February 20, 2015, accessed May 22, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Led Zeppelin - Hear an unreleased version of When the Levee Breaks. The Guardian , July 23, 2015, accessed May 18, 2017 .
  12. ^ Robert Christgau : Led Zeppelin - Consumer Guide Reviews. Retrieved May 20, 2017 (English).
  13. ↑ Thomas Erlewine : Led Zeppelin IV - AllMusic Review. Allmusic , accessed on May 18, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Led Zeppelin loosens its grip on using its music in films. LA Times , December 3, 2012, accessed May 20, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Led Zeppelin Supply the Big Groove for 'The Big Short' Trailer. Ultimate Classic Rock, September 23, 2015, accessed May 20, 2017 .
  16. ^ A Short History of 'When the Levee Breaks'. Wired , August 30, 2008, accessed May 26, 2017 .