Flood: The scene is political – “When the Levee Breaks” by Memphis Minnie and Led Zeppelin

2024-09-20 09:50:33

The mother of all floods was the Mississippi flood of 1927. It changed not only America but the world. Without a song about dikes, music history would be different – because of a guitar riff that everyone knows.

Memphis Minnie sings: “If it rains like this, the boat will break.” “The meaning of the old that taught me to cry and complain.” He works day and night on the boat to collect the water and protect his land.

“When the Levee Breaks” commemorates the flood of 1927, when the Mississippi River in the United States flooded the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois and Kentucky. It wasn’t just pop music that came out of the water and blues of Memphis Minnie, which sold like hotcakes like a shellac single. Black, so-called race music has conquered white markets.

America also became different. The flood drove the descendants of the slaves from the farm, which sank into the mud. They went north, to the cities, where, by picking their guitars, they formed the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll – and, in their protests against segregation, thought of civil rights.

Every major flood changes the cultural landscape rather than the habitats threatened by the floods and the violations of the plastics. Water level becomes a political issue. The rulers became Dike rulers with deep eyes in rubber boots, the rulers became emperors who filled sand in the bags. Like an uncontrolled flow of nature, flooding is often an election campaign.

Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie already knew this when they wrote “When the Levee Breaks” 95 years ago and put it on a record: “I sit on the levee all night and cry and think of my home.”

The fact that a little tragic song could become a major classic of the 20th and 21st centuries is partly due to the band’s Led Zeppelin recorded it in 1971 and turned it into a rock anthem, the guitar riff of which was also by The Beastie Boys and others. It is because in 2005, when the levees broke in America, musicians like Jay-Z and Kanye West donated money and comfort as the heirs of Memphis Minnie. On the other hand, it is due to water when it rises again.