anonymous February 22nd, 2007 03:33PM  
It is a cover from an old american blues song, and to me it pretty much means that the rain is bad events and the levee is one's personal ability to cope with these problems. "If it keeps on raining the levee's gonna break"... can't say I haven't felt like that before!

anonymous May 30th, 2007 06:01PM  
The song is a cover of an old blues tune by "Kansas" Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, which was about the mass upheaval of people from the Mississippi River area following the 1927 flood, and how the African Americans were put into a state of almost slave labor in trying to keep the floodwaters from spreading by the local and state gov'ts at the time. The "Don't it make ya feel bad...Chicago" were added by Plant. Clear as day, this is the man going back home, or at least where his home once was, only to find nothing is left. "Don't it make ya feel bad when you're trying to find your way home, but ya don't know which way to go?" = Since the area is a vast, flat wasteland it becomes hard to not only find your way, but in a deeper sense, that you can't find what you once called "home." "If you're goin down south, they've got no work to do" = now that nothing's left, there's no available jobs. "if you don't know about Chicago" = "if you don't know about the Chicago blues scene". He's saying Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie lost their jobs in the delta, so they moved to Chicago and started playing blues there. The "goin to chicago" only blatantly furthers this idea.

CHAD November 5th, 2008 01:46PM  
This is an old blues song,much like the many others that influenced british rock musicians of the sixties and seventies.