In the memoir, Fogerty jumps from the anecdote to his own fans: people, like me, who “would listen to my songs and ask, ‘Where does this come from?’ ” “I had trouble explaining that,” Fogerty writes. I think, perhaps, what my mom may have done, accidentally, was set me off in a direction we would now, loosely, call ‘Americana.’ ” “ ‘Oh! Susanna,’ I loved it then,” Fogerty told me. This moment, one of Fogerty’s earliest memories, is also the starting point of his new memoir, “Fortunate Son,” which goes on to detail his life as a songwriter and leader of the great American rock band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. But it’s remarkable to me that she explained that the songs were written by Foster. I didn’t know about the calendar, history, and all of that.
Now, for a while, I think I actually believed Stephen Foster was in there somewhere, singing on the record. The other side was ‘Camptown Races.’ After she played the two songs, she told me those songs were written by Stephen Foster. One side was ‘Oh! Susanna,’ which I really loved. My mom sat me down and presented me with a little children’s record. A straight beat would be just a bit boring, but anything flashy would undermine the sound.Īnd it’s really all about the sound: deep, dark, swampy, full of heat and humidity and maybe something dangerous lurking around every turn, and 1,000 years old even if it was just born yesterday.“I was very young,” John Fogerty said, late last month, on the phone from his home in California. So clinically precise, and so simpatico with that riff. Not when that lick starts echoing across my speaker and the best cowbell in the history of rock ‘n’ roll (tough luck, “Don’t Fear The Reaper”) kicks in and Fogerty sings:Īnd I’m continually astounded about what Doug Clifford is doing anytime Fogerty is playing the main riff: smashing his crash cymbal on the twos and fours and then doing a little roll on every other four. I know that John Fogerty was born in fucking Berkeley, and that every single bit of “Born on the Bayou” is an affectation. My poppa said, “Son, don’t let the man get you Gritty, gut-wrenching & gorgeous at the same time, giving us origin story. The sheer sound of it, right? That echoing guitar and those drums with every single drumbeat in place, and the bass run during the first solo and handclaps & cowbell everywhere and oh my god John Fogerty’s voice.
That’s why I’ve been obsessed with “Born on the Bayou” for decades. And yet, it’s totally different from not just other CCR songs, but every other song ever. So in that respect, it’s not that different from many other CCR songs. On one level it’s so simple: Tom Fogerty’s guitar is in one channel and John Fogerty’s guitar in the other, while Stu Cook and Doug Clifford are holding down the fort in the middle. With its feedback lick rising like an alligator from the swamp, “Born on the Bayou” is 5:14 of mysterious sonic pleasure.
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