"When the Levee Breaks" is a country blues song written and first recorded by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929.

"When the Levee Breaks" was re-worked by English rock group Led Zeppelin and became the final song on their untitled fourth album.

When blues musical duo Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie wrote "When the Levee Breaks", the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was still fresh in people's memories.

[8] Columbia issued the song on the then-standard 78 rpm phonograph record in August or June 1929 with "That Will Be Alright", another vocal performance by McCoy, on the flip-side.

When considering material for the group to record, singer Robert Plant had suggested the Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie song.

[12] Although Page and John Paul Jones based their guitar and bass lines on the original song,[13] they did not follow its twelve-bar blues I–IV–V–I structure, but instead used a one-chord or modal approach to create a droning sound.

[12] John Bonham's drumming, on a Ludwig kit, was recorded in the lobby of Headley Grange using two Beyerdynamic M 160 microphones which were suspended above a flight of stairs.

[12] Music critic Robert Christgau said Led Zeppelin's version of "When the Levee Breaks" was the greatest achievement of their fourth album.

[21] AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in a retrospective review, commented that the song was the only piece on their fourth album equal to "Stairway to Heaven" and called it "an apocalyptic slice of urban blues ... as forceful and frightening as Zeppelin ever got, and its seismic rhythms and layered dynamics illustrate why none of their imitators could ever equal them.

"[22] In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Greg Kot wrote that the song showed the band's "hard-rock blues" at their most "momentous".

This version, known as "When The Levee Breaks (Alternate UK Mix in Progress)", was recorded on May 19, 1971, at the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio at Headley Grange.