Mountain – Mississippi Queen

Live in the studio at WITF Pennsylvania, USA on February 24, 1970
“Mississippi Queen” – Single by Mountain from the album Climbing!
B-side “The Laird”
Released February 1970
Label Windfall
Songwriters Leslie West, Corky Laing, Felix Pappalardi, David Rea
Producer Felix Pappalardi

The song is about a seductive woman who teaches the singer a thing or two about the ways of love, but with the success of “Proud Mary” a year earlier, it almost sounds like this could be another song about a riverboat. In 1976, the “Mississippi Queen” riverboat was put into service by the Delta Queen company, taking its last cruise in 2008.

Considered a rock classic, it was their most successful single, reaching number 21 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970.

“Mississippi Queen” appears at number 10 on a 1995 chronological list of the “50 Heaviest Riffs of All Time” by Guitar magazine editorial staff. Author Scott R. Benarde describes the song as “an enduring anthem” with a “guitar riff that sounded like a carnivore choking on dinner”. The song is ranked 230th in The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time by biographer Martin Popoff; it also appears at number 10 on the Ultimate Classic Rock 2011 list of the “Top 10 Southern Rock Songs”. Spin magazine described it as “the cowbell jam to end all cowbell jams. Mountain are to the cowbell what Dostoevsky is to the Russian novel” in naming it number one on its 2004 list of the “Fifteen Greatest Cowbell Songs of All Time”.

This song got a music video for the first time on August 27, 2020, when Mountain posted a collage-style animated clip on YouTube.