The Led Zeppelin song that credits Ritchie Valens’ mother
Led Zeppelin picked up a nasty habit during their time as the world’s biggest rock band: they frequently took credit for other people’s compositions. Sometimes it was innocuous, like the interpolations of Robert Johnson in the songs ‘Trampled Under Foot’ and ‘The Lemon Song’, but other times it was outright thievery, like when the band didn’t originally credit Jake Holmes for writing ‘Dazed and Confused’.
Most of the time, Zeppelin got flack for reinterpreting works from traditional black artists and putting their own names on the credits. ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Bring It On Home’, ‘When the Levee Breaks’, ‘In My Time of Dying’ and more songs gave credit to band members when, in reality, they had substantial portions of their compositions written by black American singers, musicians, and songwriters. The controversy around these credits, or lack thereof, still proliferates to this day and remains a difficult part of Led Zeppelin’s overall legacy.
But one songwriting controversy was slightly sillier than the rest. During Led Zeppelin IV’s recording, road manager and Stones founding member Ian Stewart delivered The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording truck to the band. Since Stewart was an accomplished boogie-woogie piano player, the rest of the band cajoled him into slamming out some runs during ‘Rock and Roll’ and later began playing an improvised blues jam that was tucked away in the band’s vault.
When it was decided that the band’s vault would be raided to turn Physical Graffiti into a double album, the improvised track was dusted off and given a proper name, ‘Boogie With Stu’. Robert Plant based his vocal performance on Ritchie Valens’ early rock and roll classic ‘Ooh, My Head’, and when the band heard that Valens’ mother had been unable to collect her deceased son’s royalties, they listed ‘Mrs. Valens’ in the song’s credits.
As it turned out, the rare bit of generous songwriting credits from Zeppelin wound up biting them as Valens’ publishers swiftly sued the band for copyright infringement. As Jimmy Page told Guitar World in 1998: “What we tried to do was give Ritchie’s mother credit, because we heard she never received any royalties from any of her son’s hits, and Robert did lean on that lyric a bit. So what happens? They tried to sue us for all of the song!”
Check out ‘Boogie With Stu’ below.
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