“Whole Lotta Love.” “Immigrant Song.” “Rock and Roll.” “Stairway to Heaven.” Robert Plant‘s signature wails and vocal versatility—pulling back some on “The Rain Song” or delivering something bluesier on “You Shook Me”—drip all over Led Zeppelin‘s catalog. Yet, the song that stumped Plant vocally is not a track he recorded with Zeppelin. It was released on his 2007 debut album with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand.
On Raising Sand, Plant and Krauss covered two songs written by the late co-founder of The Byrds’ Gene Clark for his early country-rock duo Dillard & Clark: “Polly Come Home” (also titled “Polly”) and “Through the Morning, Through the Night.” Of the two songs, it was “Polly Come Home” that Plant had the most difficulty singing.
When originally released by Dillard & Clark on their 1969 album Through the Morning, Through the Night, “Polly” played as a softer acoustic ballad. For Raising Sand, Plant and Krauss decelerated its tempo even more, transforming it into something slow simmering, and intoxicating.
“It’s just the most difficult piece of music to sing at the tempo that we sang it at,” revealed Plant in 2021. “It’s one of the toughest calls I’ve had, apart from my audition in the Yardbirds.”
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Plant added, “The song itself is just, it’s so poignant. And it’s so slow, so the very opening line of the song—in my chest, my lungs, my vocal cords, in my sense of timing—it was, ‘How am I gonna get these words right to the end of that bar without collapsing?’ It was just such a beautiful lilt.”
Plant’s struggles didn’t go unrecognized. Raising Sand went to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and Country charts and topped the Rock chart. It also earned the duo five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for “Please Read the Letter.”
“So this is the guy that sang ‘Immigrant Song,’ he’s just gonna go and sing this song here where I need an iron lung to give me a little more air to get the song out,” Plant joked about his struggle with “Polly” on the album. “It’s just such a great song, but the tempo. It was so languid, it was magnificent. But it was a hell of a challenge.”
Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
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