Robert Plant

Plant is one of the most underrated blues singers of all time.  For all his fame, he's usually linked more with rock than blues.  But that's because he brought in the modern age of blues vocals, and because he was playing with hard rockin, electrified musicians... they called it rock.

To me, blues is about the emotion, the cadence, the riffs.  What he was doing was, in many ways, basic blues.  But his range, the high pitch, the nuances, the pleading, aching tone he brought was such a leap, it just wasn't often compared to the original bluesmen.  I guess the closest would have been Howling Wolf.

Listening to Plant today, as he's back now with his slap to Zep Band of Joy, makes me appreciate his early vocal performances all the more.  As with Aretha Franklin, Elton John and others, Plant has lost his chops over time.  Chops, at least for vocalists and guitarists, are the high notes.  They're harder than the low notes and, at least for vocalists, they take their toll over time.

I've gone through many of Aretha's videos, for example, and cannot find any recent performances where she demonstrates the chops she had in her youth.  She does not sing the songs the same way today that she did in the 60's and 70's, and neither does Plant.  I'm sure they'd love to do that, and we'd love to hear it.  But the throat is a delicate instrument and what they gave us in those years just can't be maintained indefinitely.

While Gospel always had it's high notes, and Aretha drew freely from that, blues was a chest voice genre... until Plant came along and gave the blues octaves it never had.  So, it's in honor of you, Robert Plant, I write my first blog post in several years because micro-blogging doesn't do you justice.