The most beautiful voice that Robert Plant worked with
By the time the 1980s ended, Robert Plant couldn’t have been farther away from Led Zeppelin if he had tried.
He was proud of the work he had made with his bandmates throughout the 1970s, but when John Bonham passed away, Plant didn’t want to live his life through that one persona until the end of time. ‘Percy’ was only one piece of his music, and if he was going to keep changing with the times, he was going to need to have the right people standing next to him to reinvent himself.
Then again, it’s not like Plant wanted to stray too far away from where he started every single time he played. The blues were always going to be a big part of his life, and even when working on some of his greatest solo records, there are pieces that go back to the early days of listening to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters laced throughout every song. But there were also more than a few songs that had fans scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they were listening to.
As much as Plant liked the idea of stretching himself, hearing him reborn as a new wave artist was never going to work. Shaken N’ Stirred was as good a sign as any that he wasn’t exactly David Byrne whenever he went onstage, and for a brief few years, it looked like he had started to warm up to the idea of embracing his past. Live Aid may have been a disaster when the band reformed, but the unplugged record he did with Jimmy Page and the album Walking Into Clarksdale at least showed a middle ground that they could have had in their old age.
But right when it seemed like he was completely on board again, he fell in love with music that was far more rootsy. Long before the blues had become the common language among musicians, it was all about the traditional songs from the American South, and when Plant listened to the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou, he fell in love with what those soaring harmonies could sound like in the right context.
While the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece does have a lot of great moments onscreen, it wouldn’t have been half the movie it became without that soundtrack. George Clooney might not have actually been singing all of those songs onscreen, but when Plant heard Allison Krauss’s voice blending with people like Emmylou Harris, he figured that there might be another outlet for him that wasn’t strictly rock and roll.
Krauss’s tone of voice was a lot more pristine, and to work opposite that kind of singer would be wildly interesting for him, saying, “When I was locked into O Brother Where Art Thou and ‘Down from the Mountain’, I could hear Allison. You really have to have a beautiful voice to really check all the boxes, and that’s what I heard when I heard ‘Down by the River to Pray’ and I heard this beautiful chimes of the human voice. Every single night we did that song, I remember coming skidding out of the wings to make sure I was there in time to do the harmony.”
Raising Sand wasn’t exactly going to satisfy the people who wanted to hear him find that same register he had on ‘Immigrant Song’, but that wasn’t what he was going for, either. Plant had become a much different vocalist in that length of time, and while a lot of the songs would have seemed easier for any belter, it’s a lot more difficult to capture the subtle emotions that he was able to hit with Krauss guiding him through this other side of Americana music.
The world might not have been ready to hear a rock god grow up, but it was no problem for him to gravitate towards songs that sounded a lot closer to ‘Gallows Pole’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’ than ‘In My Time of Dying’ or ‘How Many More Times’. There was a time and place for him to sing those songs, but as he approached his older age, Plant moulded himself into the kind of gritty rock and roll refugee that he had been searching for ever since 1980.
