John Fogerty names the best song of his career: “I felt like Cole Porter”
With Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Fogerty created a songbook that will live for hundreds of years.
While his voice might not be what it once was, that doesn’t matter when he has tens of thousands of fans on backing vocal duties to sing back every word like at his set at Glastonbury Festival on the Pyramid Stage in 2025.
Beloved classics like ‘Bad Moon Rising’, ‘Fortunate Son’, ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain?’, ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Up Around The Bend’ are all songs that have been ingrained in our collective psyches from an early age. Most songwriters would do ungodly things to even have one of those songs as their own, let alone all five.
Therefore, due to the rolodex of classics that Fogerty has at his fingertips, picking just one favourite would be a difficult task for most. However, for sentimental reasons and the story behind the track, ‘Proud Mary’ is the song that makes him proudest.
The genesis of ‘Proud Mary’ dates back to before his musical career became a full-time occupation, when Fogerty’s life took an unwanted detour when he was drafted to serve in the US Army. While he would have preferred to devote this time to honing his craft, the musician and his country were embroiled in the controversial Vietnam War.
Thankfully, Fogerty only needed to participate in training before being put in the reserves for a year before being discharged in 1968. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Despite being thousands of miles away from the conflict, his time stationed as a stocking clerk at Fort Knox military base gave him insight into the severity of the situation.
Fogerty had no desire to get on the frontline. However, he had little choice but to put his moral issues with the Vietnam War to one side and serve the people of America upon being drafted. By the end of his tenure with the US Army, he’d already formed Creedence Clearwater Revival and started waiting for the opportunity to pursue his passion on a full-time basis.
Upon his discharge, Fogerty was ecstatic and filled with an overwhelming sense of relief. Naturally, during this moment of extreme emotion, he turned to his pen, and the result was the blazing ‘Proud Mary’, which he funnelled his energy into creating.
Explaining in Bad Moon Rising: The Unofficial History of Creedence Clearwater Revival by Hank Bordowitz, Fogerty said of the song: “The Army and Creedence overlapped, so I was ‘that hippie with a record on the radio.’ I’d been trying to get out of the Army, and on the steps of my apartment house sat a diploma-sized letter from the government. It sat there for a couple of days, right next to my door. One day, I saw the envelope and bent down to look at it, noticing it said ‘John Fogerty.'”
He continued: “I went into the house, opened the thing up, and saw that it was my honorable discharge from the Army. I was finally out! This was 1968 and people were still dying. I was so happy, I ran out into my little patch of lawn and turned cartwheels. Then I went into my house, picked up my guitar and started strumming. ‘Left a good job in the city’ and then several good lines came out of me immediately.”
For many artists, it can take them years before they realise the greatness of their work. However, Fogerty knew that he’d written a classic in ‘Proud Mary’ even before the track had been completed, adding, “By the time I hit ‘Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river,’ I knew I had written my best song. It vibrated inside me. When we rehearsed it, I felt like Cole Porter.”
Not only was ‘Proud Mary’ his best song, but the case can also be made that it was also the high point of Tina Turner’s career when she recorded her version. While Turner took it in a different direction from Creedence Clearwater Revival with her wondrous cover, which is also the better-known rendition, it’s also a testament to the genius songwriting from Fogerty that she was able to.
