‘Fortunate Son’: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s attack on the elite
Whenever the topic of the Vietnam War crops up in any given documentary, the requisite footage of cynical marines with one foot in their graves and napalmed jungles burned into the popular perception of America’s disaster are typically scored with either The Rolling Stones’ apocalyptic ‘Gimme Shelter’ or Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s ‘Fortunate Son’.
Released as a double A-side with ‘Down on the Corner’ for 1969’s Willy and the Poor Boys, frontman and songwriter John Fogerty provided an anthem for the working class men sent overseas as cannon fodder and the sons of the capital class who ‘had the dough and didn’t have to go’.
Fogerty knew the perils of the draft all too well. Signing up with a United States Army Reserve recruiter the day he received his notice and expecting to join the military, he was instead trained as a supply clerk to provide key logistical support, receiving training at Fort Bragg and remaining a part-time reservist until his official discharge in 1968. After his close call with the service, Fogerty launched the hugely offensive band ‘The Golliwogs’ with his brother Tom before wisely renaming the band c, establishing himself as the singer and principal creative force.
CCR swiftly ascended the upper echelons of the counterculture, releasing four acclaimed albums by the time of their Woodstock performance. Eschewing the era’s psych trends for a rootsy, ‘back to basics’ rock and roll, CCR cut a distinctive mark amid the 1960s’ flower generation, avoiding progressive freakouts for unapologetically stirring blues rock. Following the Grateful Dead’s set and witnessing a scene of bored hippies disconnected to Jerry Garcia’s improv guitar noodling, Fogerty described the audience as a “Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud”.
A distaste for the hedonistic pursuits and creatively aloof indulgences of his musical peers was a manifestation of his firm class anchorage, sharpened by the discipline he received during his army training. This regimen worldview and fierce attention to social strata informed one of CCR’s biggest hits.
Speaking on The Voice in 2015, Fogerty gave insight into ‘Fortunate Son’s’ fiery genesis: “The thoughts behind this song—it was a lot of anger. So it was the Vietnam War going on. … Now I was drafted, and they’re making me fight, and no one has actually defined why. So this was all boiling inside of me, and I sat down on the edge of my bed, and out came, ‘It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son!’ You know, it took about 20 minutes to write the song.”
The very term ‘fortunate son’ was born from the cosy proximity between capital and social mobility. Recalling the 1953 swearing-in of Dwight D Eisenhower for President as a boy, one recurring phrase stuck with him into adulthood: “I would watch these conventions on television; they were pretty boring, but every now and then somebody would get up and say, ‘Well, the great state of Texas would like to nominate her favourite son Billie Sol Estes’ or something like that, and so the idea of the ‘favourite son’ kind of stuck in my mind. I was kind of at the lower end of the economic scale, you might say, so I was a little suspicious of powerful and rich people.”
‘Fortunate Son’ was an eternal rebuke against American military interventions and the trail of working-class blood it leaves behind has lost none of its bite, and Fogerty still staunchly defends the song’s integrity. After bafflingly being played ahead of a Michigan rally for Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, who had successfully avoided the draft due to a suspect ‘bone spurs’ diagnosis, Fogerty promptly sent a cease and desist order.
He conclusively declared during a Facebook Watch session at the time: “I find it confusing, I would say, that the president has chosen to use my song for his political rallies, when in fact it seems like he is probably the ‘fortunate son’.”
