“Travelling Riverside Blues” by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin cut "Travelling Riverside Blues" for the BBC on June 23, 1969, at the Aeolian Hall studios in the middle of their summer tour of Britain, with John Walters producing the session, and the track sat unreleased until 1990. The song itself goes back to Robert Johnson, who recorded it in Dallas in 1937 at his final session, which is why the credit reads Johnson, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Zeppelin treat the original as a launch pad rather than a museum piece. Johnson played it alone on one slide guitar; here Page's electric guitar, John Paul Jones's bass and John Bonham's drums turn it into a full-band stomp, with Plant hollering out front like the blues was his birthright.

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