When the Levee Breaks

Just two years after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 devastated the South, the husband-and-wife duo of Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy walked into a New York studio and immortalized the tragedy. Joe sang the haunting lead vocal and provided a relentless, chugging rhythm guitar that mimicked the rising, churning water. Minnie answered him with stinging, highly articulate lead guitar lines. The chilling acoustic duet captured the sheer terror of environmental collapse and forced displacement. Decades later, Led Zeppelin famously radically reworked the track, turning Minnie's acoustic lament into a thunderous, apocalyptic rock anthem.