Tag: Creedence Clearwater Revival

John Fogerty and Family Gift Us “Green River” from the Campfire

As people are locked down at home during the coronavirus pandemic, John Fogerty has joined other artists sending us gifts through video. Most recently, he gave us a video of the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “Green River.”

The video features Fogerty with his children Shane, Tyler and Kelsey around the campfire, apparently from Fogerty’s Ventura, California home. With Fogerty’s great voice, one cannot get much better than this one. In addition to the campfire, there are marshmallows and a stuffed Winnie the Pooh.

Fogerty begins the video with an explanation of how he got the title “Green River.” A drink inspired the song. Check out the pandemic video of the day.

Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    When Cotton Gets Rotten

    Tom Cotton

    One ridiculous aspect about comments made by President Donald Trump regarding his preference for immigrants from Norway over immigrants from Haiti and some other African nations is the debate about his language.  Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Senator David Perdue of Georgia, who attended the Oval Office meeting, defend the president by using a bit of linguistic legerdemain.

    While reliable sources confirm that Trump referred to Haiti and other countries as “shithole countries,” Trump’s allies have raised an interesting defense.  Cotton and Perdue supported Trump by denying the president said the word.  But apparently the basis for their defense is that Trump actually said “shithouse countries.”

    Others may debate whether it is more or less racist to have used one term over the other.  But it is clear that politics is at a low level when you have elected Senators even making such an argument to suck up to this president.

    The incident, however, probably is not a new low for politics.  Just considering Cotton’s record, one sees a man whose loyalty to ideology often trumps traditional notions of national service.  For example, during his first year in the Senate in 2015, Cotton organized other Senators to undermine President Barack Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran through a letter to the government of a foreign country.

    Cotton also worked to prevent the confirmation of a highly qualified African-American woman to be the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas because she was friends with President Obama.  The nominee, Cassandra Butts, had a distinguished career when she was nominated for a position that needed to be filled.

    After a hearing about Butts’s nomination in May 2014, Cotton put a hold on her confirmation.  He later told her that he was doing it because he knew she had been friends with President Obama since law school.  And he wanted to hurt the president.  Butts spent the last 835 days of her life waiting for the confirmation before she died of acute leukemia.

    “Cotton Fields”

    For something nicer, when I think of rotten cotton, I go back to the classic song “Cotton Fields.”

    Oh, when them cotton bolls get rotten,
    You can’t pick very much cotton
    In them old cotton fields back home.

    Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, wrote “Cotton Fields.” He recorded it in 1940.

    A number of famous artists have covered the song, including Odetta, Harry Belafonte, the Beach Boys, and Johnny Cash. But my favorite cover version is the one by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

    The CCR version is the one I grew up listening to.  It appeared on their 1969 album Willy and the Poor Boys.

    “Cotton Fields” is a wonderful song that people still enjoy more than seventy-five years after it was first recorded. By contrast, seventy-five years from now, nobody will probably remember how a man named Cotton tried to ingratiate himself to a president based on a distinction between “shithole” and “shithouse.”

    Photo of cotton fields via Creative Commons and Kimberly Vardeman. What is your favorite version of “Cotton Fields”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    John Fogerty Rocks One More Time for Letterman

    Fogerty Letterman

    This week, John Fogerty pulled out several of his classic Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes in a medley on The Late Show with David Letterman. At a thunderous pace, Fogerty played excerpts from “Travelin’ Band,” “Proud Mary” and “Fortunate Son.”

    Having seen Fogerty live during the era where he did not play CCR songs because of legal battles, I am always happy to see him bust out these great songs even though I also love his post-CCR songs. Note where Fogerty points when he gets to the “Proud Mary” lines about leaving a good job in the city. Check it out.

    If you wish to catch Fogerty live singing some of his CCR songs, check out his tour this summer. As for Letterman, watch for this final show on May 20, 2015.

    What CCR song would you like to hear Fogerty perform? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Columbia Records Drops Johnny Cash: “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

    Last Johnny Cash album with Columbia On July 15 in 1986, Columbia Records dropped Johnny Cash from its label after a relationship that lasted more than two and a half decades. According to the Los Angeles Times, Rick Blackburn, head of Columbia-Epic-CBS Nashville, explained, “This is the hardest decision that I’ve ever had to make in my life.”

    Cash had signed with Columbia in 1960, after the label convinced him to leave his first label, Sun Records. During the next few decades, Cash of course had a great career with Columbia, where he recorded many of his classic songs.

    But by 1986, the industry had changed and Cash was no longer producing hits. Cash’s final album with Columbia was Rainbow (1985). The album included Cash’s cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “Casey’s Last Ride,” which was written by Kris Kristofferson.

    Cash did not stay unemployed for long, and he was soon signed by Mercury Records. And then in 1994 he released his first album with producer’s Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label, beginning a major comeback that included several albums before Cash passed away.

    “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

    I don’t know what Cash said when he heard that Columbia was dropping him, but I like to imagine it was something like, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” the title of a traditional folk song that he later recorded with American Recordings.

    “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” appeared on American V: A Hundred Highways (2006), which came out after Cash’s death. In the song, the singer recounts how one cannot escape God.

    “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” has been recorded by a number of artists, with some using the different title of “Run On.”

    As Cash and Rubin did with other songs, their version of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”/”Run On” sounds quite different from other versions.  For example, the Cash version differs significantly from this version of “Run On” from another artist who started with Sun Records, Elvis Presley.

    The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded a version of “Run On” that appeared on Spirit Of The Century (2001).

    But the version of the song that most people have probably heard is a song from Moby’s mega-selling album Play (1999).  Moby’s song incorporated sampled vocals by Bill Landford & The Landfordaires.

    In the end, both Cash and Columbia Records managed to run on and do fine. Had Cash stayed with Columbia Records for the rest of his life, he might never have made the brilliant music he did with Rick Rubin at American Recordings.

    And in 2007, Columbia got a new co-head: Rick Rubin.  Rubin then left Columbia in 2012 to revive his American Recordings label imprint.

    What is your favorite version of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Buck Owens: Don’t Judge a Man’s Music By His Overalls

    Buck Owens Hee Haw On March 25 in 2006, Buck Owens, who was born Alvis Edgar Owens Jr., passed away. When I was a kid, I thought Buck Owens was just a goofy guy who wore his overalls backwards and joked around on Hee Haw with Roy Clark. But as I grew up and learned more about classic country music, I discovered that Owens was a legend who made great music with his band, The Buckaroos.

    Along with Merle Haggard, Owens was one of the first to stand up against the slick Nashville music to help create and popularize a rock-influenced honky tonk music called “the Bakersfield sound” that influenced and continues to influence many great country artists like Brad Paisley. In the clip below, Owens and his long-time legendary guitarist Don Rich performed “Love’s Gonna Live Here” in 1966 on the Jimmy Dean Show.

    One of the artists touched by Owens is Dwight Yoakam. After Owens lost his friend and guitarist Don Rich in a motorcycle accident in 1974, Owens drifted out of the spotlight and eventually stopped recording music. In 1988, though, Dwight Yoakam helped bring Owens back to popularity when the two recorded a new version of Owens’s 1973 hit written by Homer Joy, “Streets of Bakersfield.”

    The collaboration between Yoakam and Owens on “Streets of Bakersfield” gave Owens his first number one song in sixteen years. I love this song.

    A Buck Owens biography portrayed Owens, who was married several times as sort of a jerk at times. But like he asks in “Streets of Bakersfield” about walking in another person’s shoes (or overalls), “[H]ow many of you that sit and judge me / Have ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?”

    Country musicians were not the only ones who recognized the talent of Buck Owens and the great Bakersfield sound. In “Far Away Eyes” from Some Girls (1978), the Rolling Stones described driving through Bakersfield on the country sounding song. Creedence Clearwater Revival mentioned Owens in “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” (“Dinosaur Victrola, Listenin’ to Buck Owens”) on Cosmos Factory (1970).

    Even more famously, in 1965 the Beatles covered one of Owens’s songs, “Act Naturally,” on Help! with Ringo Starr singing lead. Years later, Buck and Ringo joined their humor and musical skills to record a new version of “Act Naturally.”

    When Owens passed away in 2006, he was sleeping in his bed. Hours earlier he was not feeling well and considered canceling a performance until he heard some fans had traveled from Oregon to California to hear him. So he stood on stage at his Crystal Palace club and restaurant, singing one last time in Bakersfield.

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