Before Led Zeppelin, who else had a song named “Stairway to Heaven”?

If there’s one riff that everyone who’s ever tried to learn guitar knows (besides Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”), it’s the opening to Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track, “Stairway to Heaven”.

There aren’t many other songs in the history of rock, or in any form of popular music for that matter, that carry the same mythic status. In fact, if you don’t just call it Stairway it’s pretty obvious that you have little to no music taste whatsoever.

It’s kind of amazing that a song with three distinct phases and lasting nearly 8 minutes could become so popular, but I guess that goes to show that not every popular song has to be a formulaic diddy. It’s said that the lyrics were largely improvised by Page and Plant one night in 1970 next to a fire.

But it turns out you can’t copyright a song title which is good news for Led Zeppelin, because this artist had already put out a song with the exact same name way before Zeppelin even had the idea for that famous opening riff. Who was it?