Robert Anthony Plant (born 20 August 1948) is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin from its founding in 1968 until their break-up in 1980. Since then, he has had a successful solo career, sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Alison Krauss. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he is known for his raw stage performances and his powerful, wide-ranging voice.
Plant was born and raised in the West Midlands area of England. On leaving grammar school he briefly trained as a chartered accountant, before leaving home aged 16 to concentrate on singing with a series of local blues bands, including Band of Joy with drummer John Bonham. In 1968 he was invited by manager Peter Grant and guitarist Jimmy Page to join the Yardbirds, which Grant and Page were attempting to keep going after some of its members had left. The new version of the Yardbirds, with Plant, changed their name to Led Zeppelin and, from the late 1960s until their disbandment in 1980, had international success.
Plant was a charismatic rock 'n' roll frontman, comparable to '70s contemporaries such as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Roger Daltrey of the Who. After Led Zeppelin dissolved in 1980, Plant continued to perform and record continuously on a variety of solo and group projects. His first two solo studio albums, Pictures at Eleven (1982) and The Principle of Moments (1983), each reached the top ten on the US Billboard 200.
With his rock and roll band the Honeydrippers he scored a top-ten hit single in 1984 with a cover version of Phil Phillips' 1959 song "Sea of Love", which featured former Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page on guitar. Plant's fourth solo studio album Now and Zen (1988) was certified 3× Platinum and is his biggest-selling solo album to date. In the 1990s, another reunion project called Page and Plant released two albums and earned a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1998 for "Most High". In 2007, Plant began a collaboration with American bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, releasing their debut studio album Raising Sand, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2009 and produced the hit song "Please Read the Letter", which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year the same year. In 2010, he revived the Band of Joy, and in 2012 formed a new band, the Sensational Space Shifters, followed by a reunion with Alison Krauss in 2021.
In 1995, Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranked Plant as one of the 100 best singers of all time (2008);100 Greatest Singers Of All Time: Robert Plant Rolling Stone. Retrieved 30 June 2015 and he was the top pick for the greatest lead singer in a 2011 readers' poll. Hit Parader named Plant the "Greatest Metal Vocalist of All Time" (2006). Plant was named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR. In 2009, Plant was voted "the greatest voice in rock" in a poll conducted by classic rock radio station Planet Rock. Billboard ranked him number four on their list of The 50 Greatest Rock Lead Singers of All Time (2023).
Early life and musical beginnings Robert Anthony Plant was born on 20 August 1948, in the Black Country town of West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England, to Robert C. Plant, a qualified civil engineer who served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and Annie Celia Plant (née Cain), who was of Romani descent. He grew up in the Hayley Green area of Halesowen, Worcestershire. Plant gained an interest in singing and rock and roll music at an early age; in an interview with Andrew Denton on the Denton talk show in 1994, Plant stated his desire, as a ten-year-old, to be like Elvis Presley:When I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten-year-old. which was all the ambience I got at ten years old ... And I always wanted to be ... a bit similar to that.Plant left King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge in his mid-teens and developed a strong passion for the blues, mainly through his admiration for Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson and early renditions of songs in this genre.
Plant abandoned training as a chartered accountant after only two weeks to attend college in an effort to gain more GCE passes and to become part of the Midlands blues scene.Led Zeppelin in Their Own Words compiled by Paul Kendall (1981), London: Omnibus Press. , p. 14.Dave Lewis and Simon Pallett (1997) Led Zeppelin: The Concert File, London: Omnibus Press. , p. 10. "I left home at 16," he said, "and I started my real education musically, moving from group to group, furthering my knowledge of the blues and of other music which had weight and was worth listening to."Fortnam, Ian (2008). "Dazed & Confused", Classic Rock Magazine: Classic Rock Presents Led Zeppelin, p. 38.
Plant's early blues influences included Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, and Jerry Miller of Moby Grape. Plant had various jobs while pursuing his music career, one of which was working for the major construction company George Wimpey in Birmingham in 1967, laying tarmac on roads. He also worked at Woolworths in Halesowen town for a short period of time. He cut three obscure singles on CBS RecordsHammer of the Gods, by Stephen Davis (p.48-49) and sang with a variety of bands, including the Crawling King Snakes, which brought him into contact with drummer John Bonham. They both went on to play in the Band of Joy, merging blues with newer psychedelic trends.
Led Zeppelin (1968–1980) Early years By July 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page was searching for a singer after the breakup of the Yardbirds.Rock, John J. Rolling Stone 6 July 1968 Page's first choice, Terry Reid, declined, but directed him to Robert Plant, who was then singing with Obs-Tweedle. Page travelled to hear Plant perform and subsequently invited him to his home, where the two found a shared enthusiasm for blues, rock, and folk music. Plant suggested his friend John Bonham for drummer, and the group—initially billed as the New Yardbirds—soon became Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album and its early British and American tours quickly established Plant as the band's lead vocalist and lyricist. Their next run of albums—Led Zeppelin II (1969), Led Zeppelin III (1970), the untitled fourth album commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Houses of the Holy (1973), and Physical Graffiti (1975)—made the band one of the most successful rock acts of the era. Plant's vocals and lyrics were central to the band's identity, while the group's music combined hard rock with blues, folk and other influences.
In 1975, Plant and his wife, Maureen, were seriously injured in a car crash while on holiday in Rhodes, Greece. The accident forced Led Zeppelin to cancel planned tour dates and shaped the making of their next album, Presence; Plant later said that the record was "absolutely wracked with pain".
In July 1977, while Led Zeppelin were touring the United States, Plant learned that his five-year-old son Karac had died from a stomach virus. The loss was a major personal blow during the band's later years.
Lyrics
Plant began writing song lyrics with Led Zeppelin during the making of Led Zeppelin II in 1969. According to Jimmy Page:
Plant's lyrics with Led Zeppelin were often mystical, philosophical and spiritual, alluding to events in classical and Norse mythology, such as "Immigrant Song", which refers to Valhalla and Viking conquests. However, the song "No Quarter" is often misunderstood to refer to the god Thor; the song actually refers to Mount Thor (which is named after the god). Another example is "The Rain Song".
Plant was influenced by the English writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien,Robert Plant himself, in Vox, May 1993, page 18, stated, "The self-indulgence, the silly over-the-top Tolkien-esque stuff ... John made it everlasting.".Helen Armstrong (1993), 'The Singer, not the Song', in Amon Hen (the bulletin of The Tolkien Society, UK), no. 123 p..4-5. whose book series inspired lyrics in some early Led Zeppelin songs. Most notably, "The Battle of Evermore", "Misty Mountain Hop", "No Quarter", "Ramble On" and "Over the Hills and Far Away" contain verses referencing Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Conversely, Plant sometimes used more straightforward blues themes dealing with sex, as in "The Lemon Song", "Trampled Under Foot" about giving in to sexual temptation, and "Black Dog" narrated by a man obsessed with a woman.
Welsh mythology forms a basis of Plant's interest in mystical lyrics. He grew up close to the Welsh border and would often take summer trips to Snowdonia. Plant bought a Welsh sheep farm in 1973, and began taking Welsh lessons and looking into the mythology of the land (such as the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Taliesin, etc.) Plant's first son, Karac, was named after the Welsh chieftain Caratacus. The song "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" is named after the 18th-century Welsh cottage Bron-Yr-Aur, owned by a friend of his father; it later inspired the title of the instrumental song "Bron-Yr-Aur" from their sixth studio album Physical Graffiti (1975). The songs "Misty Mountain Hop", "That's the Way", and early dabblings in what would become "Stairway to Heaven" were written in Wales and lyrically reflect Plant's mystical view of the land. Critic Steve Turner suggests that Plant's early and continued experiences in Wales served as the foundation for his broader interest in the mythologies he revisits in his lyrics (including those myth systems of Tolkien and the Norse)."Stairway to Heaven, Paved with Gold: Led Zeppelin's Snowdonia", The Independent, 6 April 1991.
Page's passion for diverse musical experiences influenced Plant to explore Africa, specifically Marrakesh in Morocco, where he encountered the Egyptian singer and film actress Umm Kulthum:
Both he and Jimmy Page revisited these influences during their live reunion album No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded in 1994. During his solo career Plant tapped into these influences many times, most notably on his seventh studio album Dreamland (2002).
Most of the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" from Led Zeppelin IV were written spontaneously by Plant in 1970 at Headley Grange while the track was being recorded. While never released as a single, the song has topped polls as the greatest song of all time.
Stage persona
Plant enjoyed great success with Led Zeppelin throughout the 1970s and developed a compelling image as the charismatic rock and roll front man, similar to his contemporaries the Who's lead singer Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and Jim Morrison of the Doors."Their Time is Gonna Come", Classic Rock Magazine: Classic Rock Presents Led Zeppelin, 2008. With his mane of long blond hair and powerful, bare-chested appearance, Plant helped to create the "god of rock and roll" or "rock god" archetype. On stage, Plant was particularly active in live performances, often dancing, jumping, skipping, snapping his fingers, clapping, making emphatic gestures to emphasise a lyric or cymbal crash, throwing back his head, or placing his hands on his hips. As the 1970s progressed he, along with the other members of Led Zeppelin, became increasingly flamboyant on-stage, and wore more elaborate, colourful clothing and jewellery.