On April 21, 1978, Led Zeppelin’s only guest vocalist throughout their entire discography died from complications that were a consequence of a strange habit her friends remembered as a “party trick.” The folk singer’s feature on Led Zeppelin IV was no small feat, considering the immense vocal prowess Robert Plant already brought to the band’s overall sound. She later recalled being hoarse by the end of the session trying to keep up with Plant.
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Hoarseness aside, her contributions to the band’s 1971 album added greater dimension to their fourth untitled album, even garnering her her own Led Zeppelin symbol featured on the record.
Led Zeppelin’s Only Guest Vocalist
Led Zeppelin’s fourth untitled album from 1971 opens with a straightforward rock ‘n’ roller, “Black Dog,” an energy that continues into the second track, “Rock and Roll.” But by the third track, the band brings things down into folk territory with “The Battle of Evermore.” The song is an acoustic guitar and mandolin-heavy track rife with Lord of the Rings references. Plant sings it as a duet with Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny, making it Led Zeppelin’s only guest vocalist feature. Each singer plays a different role in the story: Plant is the narrator, while Denny is the town crier.
In a 2019 episode of Digging Deep, the Robert Plant Podcast, the Led Zeppelin frontman described “The Battle of Evermore” as “an adventure in some dark place. Once upon a time, where the people are called together. There’s some kind of fanfare. You have two parts of the story. You have the impending sort of travesty on one hand, and on the other hand, you have this call to unity. I’d started to write it so that you had a section A that told the story of that. There would be a disaster. Then, I had a section B, which was the triumph and rallying. I tried to sing them both. It was a very insane idea.”
Plant said the song “didn’t sound right” with him singing both vocal lines. Having already been good friends with folk-rock musicians in the Strawbs and Fairport Convention, it seemed like an obvious choice to employ Sandy Denny, who was a member of both folk-rock groups, as the guest vocalist. The band even gifted her her very own Led Zeppelin symbol: three equilateral triangles arranged in a circle, pointed downward, connected at a single center point.
Sandy Denny Died On April 21, 1978
Sandy Denny’s late 1960s work in the Strawbs and Fairport Convention earned her the title of one of the leading female folk-rock singers of the U.K. scene. But almost as quickly as she burst on the scene with her clear, agile voice, she died at 31 years old on April 21, 1978. Her official cause of death was a traumatic mid-brain hemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. Denny got the injuries from a fall down a flight of stairs, which she was known to do on purpose as a sort of physical comedy “party trick.”
“She certainly did it in my house. It could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming,” singer-songwriter Ralph McTell recalled in I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny. “She could do it without hurting herself usually, but I had a feeling there would be one time too many.” She would find that “one time too many” in the spring of 1978. Denny had her first fall in March of that year, which led to acute headaches. She fell twice more in April, the last of which put her in a coma from which she would never awake.
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