The “Black Dog” Lyric That Might Have Inspired Robert Plant’s Next Band Post-Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin broke up after the tragic death of the band’s drummer, John Bonham, but Robert Plant still had the group on his mind as he ventured into other musical projects. Interestingly, the name of a band he started immediately following Led Zeppelin’s split in 1980 seemed to harken back to one of Led Zeppelin’s most popular songs from a decade earlier: “Black Dog” off of Led Zeppelin IV.

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From Robert Plant’s searing vocals to Jimmy Page’s driving guitar riffs to the blues-inspired call-and-response format, “Black Dog” became one of the band’s signature songs for several good reasons. And in true Plant fashion, he snuck in quite a few innuendos, many of which were subtle due to their antiquity.

One such line was, “Hey, hey, baby, when you walk that way / Watch your honey drip, can’t keep away.” Honeydripper, honey drip, and other similar phrases were used as slang for female lovers, both generally and anatomically speaking. After Led Zeppelin broke up, Plant got even more use out of the phrase—linguistically, that is.

Robert Plant Likely Used This “Black Dog” Lyric for the Name of His New Band

Ten years after Led Zeppelin first released “Black Dog” on Led Zeppelin IV, Robert Plant was in a much different place, musically and personally. The singer had suffered tremendous losses in the past decade, including the death of his young son and his long-time friend and bandmate, John Bonham. But as most creatives are wont to do, Plant was eager to continue pursuing his art not in spite of his pain but because of it. After Led Zeppelin decided they couldn’t go on without Bonham, Plant decided to start up a 1950s early rock-inspired group called The Honeydrippers.

The Honeydrippers took on many forms throughout the 1980s and again in the late 2000s. Rotating band members included Plant’s former Led Zeppelin bandmate, Jimmy Page, as well as Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers, Robbie Blunt, Paul Shaffer, Brian Setzer, and Dave Weckl, among many others.

In Paul Stenning’s Robert Plant: Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, and the Solo Years, Weckl recalled the initial recording sessions for The Honeydrippers as “intimidating but exciting and sort of freaky at the same time. I mean, all that talent, all that history in the room, and me, the ‘just-turned-twenty-four-year-old-kid,’ in there trying to hang. I believe it was sort of a group effort, and we just played the tunes. No fixes or overdubs. It wasn’t stressful at all. It was very relaxed, and I remember we had a ball.”

Aside from the band’s one full-length release and a few benefit performances in the late 2000s, not much came of Plant’s time with The Honeydrippers. Still, their name serves as a reminder of Plant’s roots in Led Zeppelin (and the subtly sexual undertones of midcentury rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues).

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