The Re-Education Of Robert Plant

Since the glory days of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant has covered a lot of ground. He has restlessly pursued interests in world music, blues, and country. In 2009 he won five Grammys for Raising Sand, an Americana album with the bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. But there was one tune the English singer tried and couldn't nail: an old Stanely Brothers number called "Little Maggie."
 "I think we actually murdered it, to be honest," Plant says. "I was trying to work out how to work the vocals, being British. It's a sense of humor that you need to even get anywhere near that stuff, so we couldn't make it work. But then, I thought: The song is great, and like the sentiment. Little Maggie's always off with some no-good, sorry man. I mean, that's what we all are, really."
 On his new album, Lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar, Plant gives the song another shot — with a new band. Plant's group is an eclectic bunch, ranging from a West African fiddle player to a British keyboardist known for heavy electronic music.
 In the Zeppelin days, Plant and his bandmates traveled to North Africa and elsewhere seeking musical inspiration. Over the last few years, he's been living and traveling throughout the southern U.S. looking for ghosts: that is, the musicians who inspired him as a child, like bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson.
 "I was going from Mississippi into Arkansas, and I was thinking about when I was a kid, how I used to listen to these amazing voices and orations, beautiful and stark Afro-American comment in song," he says. "I was going over this rusty old bridge, and I was being welcomed into West Helena by a sign that had fallen into the grass, that had Sonny Boy Williamson sitting playing harmonica on top of a corncob. So it was all the romance of these English kids who were enthralled by music and by reflections of a culture that we knew nothing about." Plant says he loved exploring the U.S. — but that, eventually, he felt the call of home. Now 66, he's back in England.