Led Zeppelin recorded a hard rock version of the track too. Cultural trends are often cyclical in nature, particularly within the music industry…

Led Zeppelin recorded a hard rock version of the track too. Cultural trends are often cyclical in nature, particularly within the music industry.

Over the years, countless different sounds and genre trends have witnessed resurgences in popularity years or even decades after they first hit the airwaves. What might sound like a bold new era for rock and roll is often just an innovative reimagining of old-school blues, as is the case with hard rock progenitors Led Zeppelin.

Offering an abrasive alternative to the psychedelic era of ‘peace and love’ hippiedom, Jimmy Page first formed Led Zeppelin back in 1968 and, almost immediately, the group began to blaze an inventive new trail for British rock.

Armed with a staunch artistic manifesto, endlessly complex riffs, and the infallible tones of frontman Robert Plant, the band quickly became one of the most renowned rock bands on the face of the Earth.

As the band itself would admit, however, they owed a great deal of their success to the music of American blues artists.
All rock and roll roads lead back to the blues.

After all, it was the pioneering sounds of early American blues artists like Robert Johnson that paved the way for the development of rock and roll back in the 1950s.

Led Zeppelin were certainly no different, and Jimmy Page regularly borrowed, interpreted, or stole licks from long-forgotten blues artists throughout the discography of the hard rock giants.
Still, Led Zeppelin was far from being the only rock group in the 1960s and 1970s to adopt such a practice.

Virtually all of the most iconic rock artists from that era – from The Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton – were endlessly indebted to the blues. As Robert Plant declared in a 1988 edition of Rolling Stone, “Everybody looks back, glances sideways, peeps over shoulders. It’s like cheating during examinations.”

Although, as Page shared, virtually every rock artist back in the day was drawing upon the inspiration of the blues, that fact also meant that many artists suspected each other of plagiarism, when they were actually just drawing inspiration from the same source.

“Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart were out there doing a double act, and we were right behind them,” Page shared.
The sonic similarities of Led Zeppelin and The Jeff Beck Group didn’t seem to sit right with Beck: “Beck’s always moaned about Pagey: ‘He knew what we were doing, Rod and I. He got this guy from the Midlands.

They were doing ‘You Shook Me.’’ We were all doing ‘You Shook Me’ at the same time.”
Originally penned by Willie Dixon and Earl Hooker, ‘You Shook Me’ was first recorded back in 1962 by the legendary blues artist Muddy Waters.

The track has been covered by countless artists over the years, but it was The Jeff Beck Group who first gave it the hard rock treatment during the recording sessions for Truth in 1968.

The following year, for their debut album, Led Zeppelin recorded a hard rock version of the track too.

For Beck, this appeared to suggest that Zeppelin had ripped off his idea, even if that idea was a cover of another artist from years prior.

Page and Plant, however, have always denied stealing Beck’s idea, or even hearing his version of the track. As the Led Zeppelin frontman declared, “It was more famous than ‘God Save the Queen’ in England at the time.”