“I started to get my head around it”: The blues musicians Jimmy Page couldn’t copy
All roads lead back to the blues. Without the genre’s pioneering rhythm and socially conscious lyricism, rock and roll would have never come to fruition. It makes sense, therefore, that a wealth of early rock stars were endlessly indebted to the blues legends which had come before them, even if those early musicians rarely achieved the same notoriety as those rockers that they inspired. Even the abrasive hard rock stylings of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin were not free from the impact of the blues.
Led Zeppelin came to define the hard rock sound of the 1970s, led by the trailblazing guitar stylings of Jimmy Page. Years prior to forming the band, however, Page had been a sought-after session musician, which forced him to adapt to a variety of different styles and genre conventions, including the blues. Admittedly, though, this fit in nicely with Page’s pre-existing musical taste, as the guitarist had been a disciple of early rockabilly and blues music from a very young age.
At the age of 12, Page was handed a guitar, and from that point forward, the instrument rarely left his arms. Largely self-taught, the young Page would soak up artistic inspiration in every aspect of his life. In the mid-1950s, the young guitarist took a liking to skiffle music, a kind of DIY precursor to rockabilly, which took a lot of cues from old blues records.
Like virtually every other kid of his generation, Page was infatuated when stars like Elvis Presley and Little Richard came along at the end of the decade, but his musical obsession and interest led the future Led Zeppelin songwriter to dig a little deeper than most. The glitz and glamour of Elvis was enough to draw anybody into his realm, but the blues influences of the King were certainly not lost on Jimmy Page, who began to trace the lineage of rockabilly back through the years.
“I soon realised that there’s a poetry within the blues as well,” he told Guitar Player, recounting his youthful interest in the genre. “The path to that was that Presley had covered a number of blues artists on his early Sun records, and that was really great. But during the process of that, people were going, ‘Who is Sleepy John Estes? Who is Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup?’” These were the blues legends who first paved the way for the rock and roll generation, though they rarely got recognition for their efforts.
Page and his small group of rock-obsessed friends started to entrench themselves in artists like Estes and Crudup. “So my friend was getting all of these sort of things in,” he recalled, “And that’s where I heard everything in advance of what was coming later.” Nevertheless, the music these artists were playing remained a mystery to the guitarist, at least in how to play it.
“I couldn’t necessarily play it,” he shared, “But I started to get my head around it. So I had rockabilly and rock and roll, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and then it started moving into the blues: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert King.” It was these early influences that set Page on a path that would see him become one of Britain’s greatest session musicians before making a name for himself with The Yardbirds and, finally, Led Zeppelin.
Given his position among the greatest guitarists in rock and roll history, it would be contentious to suggest that Page could not stand up to the playing of artists like Estes from a technical standpoint. However, blues music was never about technical proficiency or the ability to play guitar better than everybody else; it has always been about feeling, emotion, and poetry. So, while Page probably could do a decent enough cover of a Sleepy John Estes song, it simply would not pack the same punch as the man himself.
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