From Here ((also a good LZ anecdote from the Rock Pile))
That’s a great quote. The Stones, Beatles, etc. all would gladly tell you about the R&B records they loved and covered early on. Even Kurt Cobain would proudly tell you what obscure indie band he was takings bits and inspiration from.
I don’t think this is true. Zepplin’s popularity was based on the fact that they were not just a kickass cover band. It came from the notion that they had the authenticity of singer/songwriters. Their fans would not hear that anything they did was cribbed from someone else, because this was what made them a “real” rock band. They didn’t start out whsen the Beatles and the Stones did, before the “cult of authenticity,” as one current critic put it.
I don’t think it says anything about them as a band. The ability to get heavy rotation on the radio is a pretty poor way to measure the quality of a band.
Some of the greatest classical composers shamelessly plundered folk songs for melodies. Beethoven stole “Ode to Joy.”
Led Zeppelin took some chord progressions and riff ideas from crap bands and turned them into art. All great artists do that.
By the way, most of those old, original bluesmen didn’t come up with those riffs either. The vocabulary for blues riffing was created by nobodies on back porches and the really talented guys knew how to make that vocabulary soar.
I’ve been re-reading this since yesterday and I still haven’t figured out what the point of it all is.
Black people played what they played. In some cases, they played what they wanted to play; in other cases, when they were trying to make a living from it, they played what people were willing to pay them to play. Same as white people. Were there legal and social constraints on them that whites didn’t have? Sure. But unless you define “jazz and music derived from jazz” to include blues and a variety of other genres (including much of American popular music, up to and including the work of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, etc.), which is exactly backwards from the way the lines of influence are generally drawn, it’d be tough to make the case that “most” black people, or even “most black people who were playing music”, were playing jazz. And even if they were, that doesn’t mean that NO black people were playing blues, and that thus the blues were made by whites, or that NO black people were listening to blues, and thus it was being made for whites. Which was the statement I reacted to – that the blues was fake because it was made by whites for whites. After the early 1960s, maybe you could make a case that the majority of people who were playing and listening to blues were white, but that doesn’t effect a retroactive change in the history of music up to that point.
What the undeniable musical accomplishments of Armstrong, Holliday, Joplin, et al., or even William Grant Still or Paul Robeson or anyone else in other genres, have to do with that proposition is beyond me. That they were doing other things is not proof, or even an indication, that there were no black people playing or listening to blues.
Which is relevant to this in what way?