Plant & Krauss Cap Bonnaroo With Rootsy Set of Duets, Led Zep Tune

While most folks left Bonnaroo on Sunday, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss drew one of the festival's biggest audiences for a high-energy set that included mateiral from their debut collaboration Raising Sand. Plant kicked things off sans Krauss, running through tunes like "Rich Woman" with his backing band, which featured roots-rock legend T Bone Burnett. Plant also treated Zep fans to a rip-roaring rendition of the classic "Black Dog," shrieking and tossing his microphone in the air. Once Krauss joined him onstage, things got progressively more country-fied, with Krauss adding masterful fiddle lines to eerie tunes like "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us." The crowd was delighted, as was Plant. "Welcome to our little world," he said. "It's a great pleasure to bring this gift. It's been a wonderful time for you and me."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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