So everybody knows John Bonham recorded his beat for “When the Levee Breaks” in outer space or whatever, but let’s never forget those bloody kids were straight-up filching material from people who actually lived through the shit the little lads were crooning about. Ok, granted they had killer musical instincts but sheesh.

Anyway, if you really love levees breaking, you’re going to love the very arguable original “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. Spokane Sally and Montana Mike couldn’t find the studio that day. According to Robert Santelli’s The Big Book of Blues (Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1993), it was the levee in Walls, Mississippi (Minnie’s teen-years home) that informed this track more than anything else might have. Including the flood that ransacked the poorest regions of Jimme Page’s boyhood homeland. Oh, did that not happen?

MAPPING IT

The general concensus is that Minnie’s song is at least partially specifically about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.¹² That flood, says NOAA and its buddy Wikipedia, began at Mounds Landing in northwest Mississippi. Levee fixed.

HEARING IT