“Stick man” on Zep IV cover identified

It looks like the “stick man” on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album finally has a name. According to CNN, after 52 years the identity of the man has been discovered. Apparently the man’s name was Lot Long and he was a Victorian-era thatcher in Wiltshire, England.

A British researcher recently discovered the original black-and-white photo of the man (it was colorized for the album cover) while examining an old photo album. Prior to this discovery, the lore of the album image source was that Robert Plant reportedly found the portrait of the man in a local junk shop in Reading, England. And this could still be true; Plant may indeed have found a framed copy of the image.