![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]() “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. 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. Those places had changed since the late sixties and early seventies, when Creedence was the biggest American rock band. Periodically, I’d make research trips to the South: Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, places where many of Fogerty’s songs were set. During the past decade, as I’ve worked on a history of rock and roll, I’ve tried to figure out why. 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. When I was a kid, growing up in an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Fogerty’s group, Creedence Clearwater Revival, was my favorite band. “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.” 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. “I was very young,” John Fogerty said, late last month, on the phone from his home in California. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |