The Yardbirds

Bo Diddley supplied the actual songs the Yardbirds took apart onstage. Closing their debut album, a gutted "Here 'Tis" drops the melody altogether for scraped strings dueling drummer Jim McCarty's playing — "we liked percussive things," he said. "In the dressing rooms, we used to have like a percussion jam and bang on anything we could bang on... just to make, like, a percussion jam in the middle of it." The same treatment landed on "I'm a Man": the tempo-doubling breakdown that became the Yardbirds' calling card started as two Diddley records, physically pulled apart and reassembled live before anyone thought to record them.

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1955

I'm a ManBo Diddley

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1964

I'm a ManThe Yardbirds

listen forDiddley's "I'm a Man" is a slow, stomping boast, one riff worked for its full menace. The Yardbirds' version keeps the riff but abandons the patience: harmonica and guitar trade the line faster and faster until the song tips into a full-band sprint, the vocal all but left behind. That collapse into pure tempo is the "rave-up" — a device the band built specifically for this song and "Here 'Tis," not something Diddley's own records did.

No song got more work than "Smokestack Lightning." McCarty singled it out precisely because it resists arranging: "the thing about that song, it's all in one key," he said. "So what do you do? You have to think of something to make it interesting... We sort of jammed on it. Paul, myself, and Keith, we had a sort of chemistry going where we could jam and do things that we were all happy with... they were developed live." That live jamming turned a two-chord Chicago blues moan into the extended centerpiece of the band's first album.

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1956

Smokestack LightningHowlin' Wolf

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1964

Smokestack LightningThe Yardbirds

listen forWolf's original runs under three minutes, a hypnotic train-whistle vamp built almost entirely on his voice. The Yardbirds' version, cut live at London's Marquee Club, runs past five: guitar and harmonica trade the riff back and forth while the rhythm section surges toward a crescendo and eases back before surging again. Writer Richie Unterberger called it "the rave-up par excellence" — not an imitation of Wolf's arrangement, since Wolf never had one this elastic, but a structure the Yardbirds invented on top of his song.

Where the rave-up itself came from is a stranger, thinner trail — not a blues record at all, according to McCarty, but a bandleader on the same London R&B circuit. "That was Paul's idea, although I think he nicked it from the Cyril Davies All Stars," he said of the tempo-doubling breakdown. "He'd double up the tempo on his bass and then build to a huge crescendo. It got the crowd going every time." Keith Relf's own journal backs it up independently: an April 1963 entry, written before the band had even played a gig, names Davies's heavy R&B backing of blues standards as a model "to great effect."

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1963

Country Line SpecialCyril Davies

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1964

I Wish You WouldThe Yardbirds

listen forThere's no cover to hold up here — Davies never recorded "I Wish You Would," and the Yardbirds never touched "Country Line Special." Play them back to back anyway: Davies's instrumental, cut with his own R&B All-Stars, drives a shuffle harder and faster as it goes, riding harmonica over a relentless backbeat toward its own small crescendo. The Yardbirds' debut single does the same thing to a vocal song, breaking for an instrumental stretch that accelerates the same way. It's a family resemblance in technique, not a documented borrowing of this specific record.