If you ever doubted that rock and roll has its roots in the blues you need look no further than ZZ Top for clarification. Take a song like La Grange and compare it to, say, John Lee Hooker. Add amps and a wah-wah pedal and you could hardly tell the two apart. Okay, visually it would be pretty easy but that’s not what I meant and you know it. Anyway, La Grange is a classic rock song from 1973, not pigeon-holed as blues (except on my computer where I’ve tagged it that way). I posit that a cover by BB King would have been. You get three-foot beards and flashy cars and people call you a rock band when all along you’ve only been playing the blues. Poor ZZ Top. (In fact, the band got sued for copyright infringement because the song sounded so much like Hooker's Boogie Chillen. They got off on a technicality: the court ruled that the song was in the public domain and thus free to adapt at will.)
- This message brought to you by the Committee for the Elimination of Genre Discrimination. We here at CEGD support all talented musicians, regardless of the style in which they choose to play.
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