"Travelling Riverside Blues," sometimes called "Mudbone" or "Mud Bone," is a blues song written and recorded in Dallas, Texas by the bluesman Robert Johnson. Johnson's June 20, 1937 recording has a typical 12 bar blues structure (though as is common in downhome blues of this era, the length of each verse is in fact thirteen-and-a-half bars of 4/4), played on a single guitar tuned to open G, with a slide. It was first released on the 1961 compilation LP King of the Delta Blues Singers. The song has proved popular with more recent blues musicians.
The song is well known for the lyrics:
- "I want you to squeeze my lemon
- until the juice runs down my leg."
The song was made internationally famous by the band Led Zeppelin, whose version of the song is most known to modern listeners.
Read more about Travelling Riverside Blues: Led Zeppelin Version, Other Versions
Famous quotes containing the words travelling, riverside and/or blues:
“But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Upset at the young wife’s
first loss of virtue
in a riverside thicket,
a flock of birds
flies up,
mourning the loss
with their wings.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)