“I was very young,” John Fogerty said, late last month, on the phone from his home in California. “I was three, three and a half, maybe. My mom sat me down and presented me with a little children’s record. One side was ‘Oh! Susanna,’ which I really loved. The other side was ‘Camptown Races.’ After she played the two songs, she told me those songs were written by Stephen Foster. Now, for a while, I think I actually believed Stephen Foster was in there somewhere, singing on the record. I didn’t know about the calendar, history, and all of that. But it’s remarkable to me that she explained that the songs were written by Foster. I find that fascinating. I don’t think you do that, normally.”
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. “ ‘Oh! Susanna,’ I loved it then,” Fogerty told me. “It’s one of my favorite songs. I think, perhaps, what my mom may have done, accidentally, was set me off in a direction we would now, loosely, call ‘Americana.’ ”
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 hadn’t been to Mississippi when I wrote ‘Proud Mary,’ nor had I been to Louisiana when I wrote ‘Born on the Bayou.’ Somehow it all just seemed familiar to me.” Then he draws a straight parallel: “In recent years, I was fascinated to learn that even though he wrote all these songs about the South, Stephen Foster was from Pittsburgh! I think he wrote ‘Swanee River’ long before he’d ever been to the South.”
When I was a kid, growing up in an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Fogerty’s group, Creedence Clearwater Revival, was my favorite band. At that age, “Green River,” and “Born on the Bayou” felt as real as my actual surroundings, and formed my introduction to the America in which I had arrived. During the past decade, as I’ve worked on a history of rock and roll, I’ve tried to figure out why. Periodically, I’d make research trips to the South: Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, places where many of Fogerty’s songs were set. Those places had changed since the late sixties and early seventies, when Creedence was the biggest American rock band. (In 1969 alone, C.C.R. had three Top Ten albums.) But the South itself still looked, very much, like the South that Fogerty had conjured up, out of whole cloth, in working-class El Cerrito, California, thousands of miles away. “I’ve had guys from Louisiana tell me, ‘We used to argue over whether you’re from Thibodaux or the next town over,’ ” Fogerty writes in the memoir.
Why did Fogerty’s songs translate so well, and so widely? In part, it had to do with their simplicity and efficiency, and the lucidity of Fogerty’s arrangements. For C.C.R., this meant that there was little they could do, in concert, to improve on their recordings, other than play the songs harder. (For every bar and garage band that’s come along since, it’s meant that the songs could be played, effectively, by skilled and unskilled musicians alike.) But, at the same time, the songs that Fogerty wrote were elastic enough to admit any number of interpretations—by Ike and Tina Turner, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Mavis Staples, Etta James, the Minutemen, Miriam Makeba, Elton John, Johnny Cash, and many, many others across the musical spectrum. (In Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 film, “The Act of Killing,” the onetime members of an Indonesian death squad are seen singing C.C.R.’s arrangement of Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields.”)
As he put it himself, explicitly, John Fogerty wrote songs for everyone. “When I would write a song like ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain,’ I made it general and epochal,” Fogerty has said. “I tried to stretch it and make it bigger so that it wasn’t just a song about me, so that lots of other people could look into the song and see themselves in it, too.… I tended to make the song very broad and hope that lots of people would see it that way.”
Here, Fogerty had something in common with Chuck Berry, who explained, in his own memoir, that “a portrayal of popular or general situations and conditions in lyrics has always been my greatest objective in writing,” and with Berry Gordy, who instructed his songwriters to stick to the present tense, avoid proper names, and create the illusion in listener’s minds that Motown’s singers were singing, directly, to them.
But there’s something else about Fogerty’s style that helped C.C.R.’s songs get across. Two years ago, in Napa Valley, I sat down with his estranged bandmates, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. (C.C.R.’s fourth member, John’s brother Tom, died in 1990.) At one point, I brought up “Wrote a Song For Everyone,” which is, paradoxically, one of Fogerty’s most personal songs, and said something to Cook and Clifford about how intense and visceral it was.
“Of course,” Clifford said. “That one wasn’t a cartoon.”
“Are you saying that the other songs were cartoons?”
“Sure,” Clifford said.
I thought about this for months before deciding that the word “cartoon” describes the best rock-and-roll songs—“Johnny B. Goode,” or “Blue Suede Shoes,” or, for that matter, “Blitzkrieg Bop”—perfectly. I checked back with Clifford, who said that was exactly what he’d meant. Then I thought about Fogerty’s own, perfect “Born on the Bayou.”
Those are the song’s opening lines. (The opening guitar chord, an E7 played midway up the neck, with the low and high E strings open and droning, eerily, is Fogerty’s signature chord.) Then Fogerty, who’d never seen—let alone been born on—a bayou, describes a series of lucid, site-specific memories he could not have had:
It’s as if he’s describing a fever dream, which is deepened by the fact that Fogerty’s papa seems also to be the father we meet in “John Henry,” an old, American folk song that starts:
“John Henry” touches upon several themes that C.C.R. went on to explore, foremost among them the nostalgia for some lost agrarian past. But, of course, that same nostalgia was a founding theme of the South, where Albion’s second sons sought to recreate, on the backs of black slaves, an imagined English arcadia. And if this vision was itself a sort of cartoon—a brutal and deadly one, with strange fruit hanging from the trees—an odd thing happened when you spread the cartoonish map of “Born on the Bayou” across the partly real, partly imagined Southern landscape: you got a one-to-one ratio. The result was something like realism.
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Fogerty about writing “Born on the Bayou.’ And, it turns out, I was wrong—at least, insofar as he remembers—about the memories. “I know that the specific memories I would try to paint—that I would try to talk about, even in that song—are my own memories,” he said. “Those were things that, in one way or another, actually happened in my childhood. Quite a few of them, anyway. I was creating an atmosphere—even, almost a mythical world—that existed within that album.… It was kind of my own invention, but based on a specific area of culture that I had absorbed. ‘Born on the Bayou’—I wrote that title down in my little notebook, and I would sit and meditate, looking at the beige wall in my unadorned apartment. Mostly in the wee hours of the morning or night, not being bothered by the family or anybody else, just kind of being given the time to follow my mind. It’s a form of meditation, I think. It’s certainly some kind of literal place that I was able to go.”
That was it: the fever dream that Fogerty lost, along with his royalties, after C.C.R.’s breakup. For decades, Fogerty, who had signed away his publishing rights, refused to play his old songs, while finding it difficult, sometimes impossible, to write new ones. It was as if, having created an Edenic place that so many Americans—soldiers in Vietnam and war protesters, blacks and whites, hippies, hard hats, and college students—had agreed upon, he’d exiled himself from the garden. This is its own, long story, which Fogerty tells in the memoir, but it has a happy ending. Eventually, Fogerty did reconnect with the deep, American vein he’d tapped as a very young man. “There seems to be this sort of rather large—I want to use the word booming, or throbbing—undercurrent that was American cultural history,” he told me. “It’s kind of vague. I think we all sense it. But most of us don’t really study it. Maybe it’s even more confused, now that we have the Internet and all the media. But even back in my time, in the fifties or sixties, it sort of came through in little snippets. You didn’t sit around and have a big dose of it. But people like Stephen Foster, of course, resided there. Mark Twain. That sort of thing seemed to be the foundation, the under-layer of American culture. I was a kid. I was a young person. I wasn’t trying to be John Steinbeck, I was trying to be a rock-and-roll writer. And yet, I was aware of that.”
