The Lemon Song by Led Zeppelin (1969)

The line everybody knows from The Lemon Song is not Led Zeppelin's. Robert Plant lifted it from Robert Johnson's Traveling Riverside Blues, where the "lemon" was already borrowed from earlier Delta blues. Zeppelin's version, on their second album in 1969, welds that lemon to Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor and stretches the result into six minutes of live-in-the-studio riffing, with the anatomy arriving late and leaving quickly, as anatomy does.

The welding was close enough that Wolf's publisher sued, and Chester Burnett eventually received a writing credit, which means the band that did more than anyone to sell the blues to white teenagers ended up paying for the blues after the fact. Led Zeppelin II went to number one in the United States and is certified twelve times Platinum, so the settlement was affordable.

Its afterlife is the lineage itself. If you want to trace how a filthy joke travels, from a Mississippi juke joint to a Chicago blues bar to a British rock band to every classic-rock station on earth, the "lemon" is the best-documented example there is. Most people know the riff; fewer have thought about the fruit; the lawsuit is the part nobody sings along to.