The singer Robert Plant described as the last echo of the blues: “He could frighten a lot of people”
Blues is the root of all rock and roll revolution, having laid down the foundations of that infectious rebellion in the days before electric guitars and tight trousers had ever been conjured up.
Even the progenitive hard rock stylings of Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin found themselves endlessly indebted to the sounds of blues, and one legendary figure in particular.
First emerging from the American south during the age of the Civil War, blues music has always belonged to the people. Those first forgotten artists who put their woes into song with the aid of an acoustic guitar weren’t big stars – in fact, they could travel to the next town over and likely find nobody who knew their name.
Instead, those grassroots sounds were passed down through the generations, being morphed and moulded with every passing year, but largely remaining underneath the surface of the mainstream.
It wasn’t until the 1950s, in fact, that blues started to creep onto the mainstream airwaves, with the added promotion of rock and roll’s emergence, and the fact that everybody from Elvis Presley to Little Richard was endlessly indebted to the blues sounds that preceded them. For an entire generation of young musicians – including Robert Plant – that rock and roll boom opened the floodgates to a colossal wave of old-school blues inspiration.
Hence, if you strip away all the complex riffs, flamboyant performance style, and pioneering distortion of Led Zeppelin’s material, you are left with something which wouldn’t sound out of place in the American blues scene of the 1950s. You could say the same about virtually every rock band of the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, spanning the spectrum from The Rolling Stones to Rainbow.
One specific figure who all of those groups owed their entire existence to was Howlin’ Wolf, one of the last great blues heroes to predate rock and roll’s emergence. Plant, of course, was a natural disciple of Wolf’s performance style, using the guitarist to influence his own sensibilities when it came to fronting Zeppelin, particularly during those early years.
“His personality and his presence were so overpowering that he could frighten a lot of people,” Plant once said of his blues hero, declaring: “He was really the last echo of deep blues. He played a lot of songs which were on one chord, which basically started the career of people like [Eric] Clapton and Zeppelin.”
Howlin’ Wolf, of course, wasn’t the last of the blues lineage, but Plant’s claim that he was the “last echo of deep blues” does seem to ring true. Not only was he the master of that iconic Chicago blues sound, but he was also perhaps the last blues guitarist to stay true to his own artistic desires.
He could quite easily have adopted the newfangled sounds of rock and roll, and would probably have been afforded more commercial success than he ever found in the realm of blues, but he chose instead to stick to that grassroots blues sound, a beacon of authenticity throughout his tenure.
Even if he didn’t ever amass the same attention as those that he inspired, though, Wolf’s legacy is still felt across the entire spectrum of rock and roll to this day, and he certainly remains a favourite of Robert Plant.
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