“Made me want to play like that”: the singer John Fogerty loved as much as The Beatles
You wouldn’t have known that John Fogerty was from the California sunshine state.
Bottling that Southern swamp rock with such authenticity, Fogerty and his Creedence Clearwater Revival stood as one of the most instrumental forces of the roots rock explosion by the 1960s’ end. They were part of a broader movement. Bob Dylan was already immersed in John Wesley Harding’s country stroll, and his former Hawks electric backing group re-emerged as The Band and established themselves as one of the premier folk-rock names of the day.
Before long, The Beatles shed Sgt Pepper’s kaleidoscopic military clobber and The Rolling Stones jumped back to mining Americana’s musical sediments and sparking their golden album run from Beggars Banquet.
But a surer resistance to the psychedelic trends smattering the day’s rock and pop chart emanated from Fogerty when captaining CCR’s swerve around flower power. He venerated the old masters too much. While respectful of the British invasion’s welcome hijack of the Billboard Hot 100, Fogerty’s earthy, stolid songcraft and dependable riffs are deeply enamoured with the ‘Founding Fathers’ of US music, enamoured with rock and roll as much as everyone else in his generation, yet stretching back even earlier to the country and western heroes down south.
Taking part in Track Star’s ‘Testing Music Knowledge’ YouTube series in 2025, one listen to a certain country icon prompted Fogerty to confess how much of a fan he was, and even stood the artist shoulder to shoulder with some of rock’s most enduring names.
“I loved Hank Williams as much as I love The Beatles or Elvis,” Fogerty revealed candidly. “The songs were mostly painful, seemed to me.”
Going on to recognise Jimmie Rodgers’ foundational blue yodel big bang, it was Williams who stood as country’s ultimate titan in his estimation, leaving a deeper impression on his songwriting. “Hank was the king, maybe, of country music,” he concluded.
“He made me want to play like that or sing like that.”
The song that triggered high praise from the old CCR frontman was 1952’s ‘Jambalaya (On The Bayou)’, Williams’ ode to Cajun food and life with his Drifting Cowboys backing band. Reporting on the backwater delta communities with authority, the numbers rustic universality echoes all over Fogerty’s work, the CCR songbook and his solo efforts, always rooted in the lyrical vignettes of everyday folk wandering relatable themes that psychedelia or lysergic avant-garde fancies could never afford any space to.
It’s a bold claim to elevate Williams to the stature of Presley and The Beatles, but for anyone whose lifestyle is shaped by the US South’s southern heritage, ‘The Hillbilly Shakespeare’s tales of blue-collar life have rendered the Drifting Cowboy frontman as a cultural institution likely to enjoy a presence for decades to come.
It’s what gifted Fogerty with his down south spirit, looking to the likes of Williams’ purer body of work to pen his own songbook dedicated in populist poignance over esoteric or academic deadends the roots rock wave sought to counter so memorably.
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