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Led Zeppelin & the Blues.


coogeeboy

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I have a CD titled Led Zeppelins Sources of Inspiration which features old blues artists that do songs that inspired Zeppelins music as well as giving them songs to cover.

Artists include Howling Wolf, Baba Blues, Otis Rush, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell, Snooks Eaglin etc.

Some of the tracks include Smokestack Lightening, No place to go, The Train kept a rollin, I'm a man, I cant quit you babe etc all in their original format.

As i am right into LZ's legacy that they have left the world then to me this is a very important reference because there is no doubt that LZ love the blues in it's purest form & it shows on this CD.

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  • 3 weeks later...

there's another one, called "The Early Blues Roots of Led Zeppelin", but i forget how much you can get it for.

Basically, alot of their songs are traditional blues arrangements, modified and/or reworked, sometimes so as to become barely recognisable. The only issue some have with this is that they didn't (when they originally released their albums) credit any of the original artists (where known), instead they just credited themselves. Some see this as a bit disingenuous. Personally, i like to think it is more a case of they took inspiration from so many sources that it would have seemed a little overblown to credit them all. Easier to credit those who have modified the tunes. The vast majority, if not all, of them *were* modified at least to some degree, which to me adds weight to this supposition

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  • 2 weeks later...

What makes a song "traditional" - is that when the originator is unknown or the song developed over the generations? I know some people who boycott Zep because they put their names on music that already existed. Yet others use old stuff and just credit it as traditional.

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"traditional" means it has a tradition around it, which in turn usually means it's been around for awhile.

If you credit a traditional song as "traditional" rather than trying to claim it as your own, that surely gives you more credibility than someone trying to claim they wrote it even though other people have been playing it before they supposedly wrote it?

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  • 2 weeks later...

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