Robert Plant - Singer - 1976 - Led Zeppelin

Credit: Far Out / Led Zeppelin

The closest Robert Plant ever came to being a true blues singer: “The nearest I’d get”

Sun 31 May 2026 12:00, UK

The heart of all great Led Zeppelin songs always trace their way back to the blues.

Jimmy Page may have wanted to move as far away from The Yardbirds as possible when they first started, but when you listen to how Robert Plant was singing, he had already gone through his fair share of Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon records by the time that he made that first album. There was no way of getting around their love of the genre on tunes like ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’, but there are a few records that stood out to Plant a lot more as the most authentic blues that he ever sang on vinyl.

But a lot of the greatest parts of Zeppelin’s career were about taking the basis of blues and turning it into something else. No one would have thought that ‘Dazed and Confused’ would have sounded that menacing once they got hold of the Jake Holmes classic, and even when they lifted songs wholesale like on ‘The Lemon Song’, there are plenty of moments where the whole band sounds more like a freight train moving down a track than a typical blues outfit. The blues were a start, but there was always room to grow as well.

And by Physical Graffiti, the entire band seemed to reach a higher level than anything they had done before. They had already hinted that they could stretch out the typical standards by making their rendition of ‘When the Levee Breaks’, but there’s no way of preparing the average blues fan for a song like ‘In My Time of Dying’. This was a band operating at the peak of their powers, but when someone is riding that high, it only takes one staggering low to bring them back down to Earth.

No one in the band was living the healthiest lifestyle by any means, but when Plant was involved in a massive car accident, everything seemed to stop for a moment. This was the first time they all realised that they were still human, and seeing him in the studio in a wheelchair trying his best to get every single line out on the next album, Presence, was going to be a lot more of a struggle for him.

The guy must have been in agony trying to reach the same heights that he did earlier, but Plant did look back and think that he had come close to what his blues heroes had done, saying, “The whole momentum was directed by my accident. But that didn’t stop us from working on Presence, and then going to Germany to record it. It was a very, very tough time. That was probably the nearest I’d ever get to being a blues singer — not by my voice, but by how I was feeling; not being a guy in the corner like Blind Lemon Jefferson, but just being really fucked off.”

If this were the height of Plant’s problems, though, it would have been a miracle. Although he sounds a lot more weathered by his accident on this record, the fact that he even made it to In Through the Out Door after his son passed away is practically a miracle. No one would have wanted to go on if they got the shock of their lifetime like that, but Plant was willing to move on by any means necessary.

And even on Presence, there’s a lot more punch to what the rest of the band is doing behind ‘Percy’ a lot of the time. It’s a shame that he fades into the background in some parts of the mix, but when Page created that massive guitar army at the beginning of ‘Achilles Last Stand’, it’s not like anyone was complaining about what they were doing, either.

They had simply hit another massive plateau in their songwriting, and while it may have been a little less accessible than before, Presence doesn’t deserve to be slept on as much as it does. Nothing could have beaten Physical Graffiti by any stretch, but for a band that had tried their hardest to push themselves on every record they could, this is still a cut above anything else that the rock world had ever heard.