Blues Covers During The British Blues Explosion

I Can't Quit You Baby was penned by one of the most prolific Blues legends of all time, Willie Dixon, for Otis Rush. Dixon was a shrewd player in the music world and the reasons behind him writing this song for Rush was a prime example of just how shrewd he was.

Willie Dixon, a Chess Records fixture, was about to launch his own label, Cobra, in 1955. He was going to use Otis Rush as the first highly promoted artist, and wrote this song for maximum impact. Rush was in a particularly engulfing relationship at the time and Dixon wanted to capitalize on the emotions he knew were easy to provoke.

The result was a song, this one, that climbed to number 6 on Billboard's R&B charts.

The penultimate British Blues/Rock band, Led Zeppelin, covered I Can't Quit You Baby on their premier 1969 release, Led Zeppelin.

I have always loved the Led Zeppelin version of this song, and the album was the open door to the discovery of the Blues. After exploring the history of Willie Dixon, I had a taste of something I haven't gotten my fill of, and that taste started thirty-five plus years ago. A taste kept alive by my weekly column at Squidoo Music, Coffee Cup Blues

Led Zeppelin has two Willie Dixon covers, the other being You Shook Me, along with seven other classic songs that helped anchor the band in the annals of music history.

Chester Burnett...er...Howlin' Wolf wrote this song for the 1956 Moanin' At The Moon album. I doubt that he knew the impact this one riff and no chord changes song would have on the music world as it is in the Grammy Hall of Fame, Blues Hall of Fame, on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of Top 500 songs that influenced Rock, and sits at number 285 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs Of All Time.

Whew!

The inspiration for the song? According to Howlin':

"We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning."

The Yardbirds were the first real Blues/Rock band to gain any major notice, and are remembered today for having the likes of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton as lead guitarists. How stellar is that?

Although the band slowly evolved to a more Rock sound (causing Eric Clapton to diplomatically leave the band), they always infused some American Blues influence in their music. But, the infusion was just enough to give them something to tweak into a unique experience.

The Yardbird's cover of Smokestack Lightning first appeared on their debut album, Five Live Yardbirds, and the title was given to a later live album by the band.

Good Morning Little School Girl was first recorded by John Lee "Sonny Boy Williamson ( not the more well known Sonny Boy Williamson II that borrowed his name) in 1937 for Bluebird records. The recording first demonstrated how the Blues Harp could be an important lead instrument and established John Lee as a major player in the blooming Urban Blues movement.

On June 1st, 1948, John Lee Williamson logged his last performance. After playing the Plantation Club on Chicago's' South Side, John Lee was murdered during a mugging as he walked to his home, not a city block from the club.

The performance by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After at Woodstock put the band on a map that they ended up being sorry they were on. What many believe was the best act at the legendary music festival, reaped nothing but one invite after another for the band to appear at music festivals around the world.

A couple of decades later, I read an interview with Alvin where he said the band went into hiding after a while. They couldn't get a gig that drew less than 100,000 people, and the band was missing playing the small clubs real bad.

This spoke volumes to me about Alvin Lee. Volumes that turned into vast collections as I began to listen to more and more of his music.

Ten Year After's cover of Good Morning Little School Girl is by far my favorite cover of any song, anywhere. Alvin Lee demonstrated what a force American Blues could be. He took that song and added so much of an edge that it will cut you, hold open the wound and soothe it with melodic sweetness.

I know I like to be cut by Alvin's Blues.

John Lee Hooker may have been called a Delta Blues artist, but he was really a genre all to himself. The illiterate son of a sharecropper grew to be one of the most respected and covered musicians in Blues history.

How he gets covered is beyond me, because the man would improvise every performance, every recording. He would even improvise his name.

While under contract to a recording label in Chicago, John would spend his nights roaming from studio to studio, writing songs on the fly under different names. He did this because in the early 1950's, black musicians were paid an embarrassing small amount of money by the labels the recorded for.

Although he remained somewhat obscure through the 1970's, he was called upon to play a part in 1980's Blues Brothers. From there he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award.

The Animals had a uniquely gritty approach to the American Blues. The magic was in the forceful voice of lead singer Eric Burdon and the band's emphasis on the keyboard playing of Alan Price.

In the early days of the band, they would thrive on playing the aggressive songs of John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed. The music seemed to be a natural match for the cutting edge sound that The Animals were most comfortable with.

I'm Mad Again appears on their first album, titled The Animals, along with what is probably their most well know song, House Of The Rising Sun.

It was once said of Robert Johnson, "The two of us would be playing our hearts out, then I'd turn to look at him and he was gone. I wouldn't see him again for another two to three weeks."

This is what Robert Johnson loved most. Traveling from town to town and living off his talent and charm. He is believed to have a woman to keep him in every town he traveled to. The legend about the legend is that one of his women's jealous husbands' poisoned Robert which brought an end to the ramblin' Blues singer's life at the young age of 27.

From the begin and thirty years after the British Blues Explosion faded away, Eric Clapton has carried the flag of the British love for American Blues.

Like his hero, Robert Johnson, Clapton rambled. He may have traveled from one band to another for a decade, including The Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds in the early 1960's to Derrek and The Dominoes and Cream in the later part of the decade, but his heart always was, and remains to this day, lodged deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

This awesome rendition of Ramblin' On My Mind, form a sound check for a concert in 2009, proves how timeless the American Blues as a genre truly is. Listen to today's legend play a wonderful tribute to yesterday's immortal.