I live in Seattle, and I've played with Sammy Drain and I've walked some of the same roads as Jimi did, so I'm certainly biased, but I believe much of blues-rock owes its genesis to Jimi Hendrix, and Seattle.
I'd like to share a couple of versions of Killing Floor that Jimi did a few years before Led Zeppelin conceived Lemon Song.
The first is this one from a performance in Stockholm.
Pay particular attention to the introduction, because I'd like you to compare it with the introduction to this version two years later by Led Zeppelin which we introduced in our last article.
I observe that Jimi's version is much truer to the original Howling Wolf version, although he pays no explicit tribute to Howling Wolf, at least in this performance.
Compare with this version at Monterey.
The latter is frenetic, almost as if The Experience is running a race.
Who's The Experience competing with? Would it be too rash to say they were competing with the prescience of Led Zeppelin's collective genius? Four geniuses versus one? Okay, maybe that's too much, but it's still frenetic.
Jimi's improvisations are wonderful, of course.
Now listen to the Howling Wolf version.
Okay, so Led Zeppelin has borrowed the chord progression, a rhythm guitar riff and some of the words, but not much else.
And notice that the tempo and feel is very different.
Also notice that the Howling Wolf version has basically only the one progression and riff - pretty monotonous by comparison, in my opinion.
The Howling Wolf version is also very different from the Jimi Hendrix versions.
But it's owed the honor of being the progenitor of both the Lemon Song and Jimi Hendrix' Killing Floor.
So the question is, "Did Lemon Song borrow from Jimi Hendrix' Killing Floor?" I believe they did, but maybe not consciously.
The Led Zeppelin uses a different riff with the verse (A part) than the Jimi Hendrix version, but both use a different riff for the verse from the Howling Wolf version.
Similarly, both use the Howling Wolf main guitar riff and chord progression in their B part, during which both Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page improvise.
That's interesting.
All three versions use slightly different lyrics, some phrases are identical between versions, and others are not.
That's also interesting.
It's like the artists all understand the song elements conceptually, but have modified, added to and rearranged them.
Next time, we'll start grokking the Led Zeppelin II version of Lemon Song, and try to identify analogous elements in Skip James' Killing Floor.
That is going to be really interesting.