Fogerty John - Fortunate son : my life, my music

I T ALL BEGAN with a record. A childrens record.

My mother, Lucile, was a teacher at a nursery school about half a mile from our home, down a dirt road. I remember walking there a few times when I was four or five years old. By myself. Thats how innocent our townEl Cerrito, Californiawas then.

One day, at around this time, my mom brought me home after school and gave me this record. It was a small-size childrens record, and nearly the first object I would have realized was my possessionmine alone. My mom sort of made a presentation of it, and we listened to it together.

The sound of it! Like a bolt into my brain. On each side of this record there was, of course, a song. For all I know the artist couldve been Fred Merkle and the Boneheads, but I sure do remember the songs: Oh! Susanna and Camptown Races. And for some odd reason my mother explained that Stephen Foster wrote both of them. He was a songwriter. Thats just a fascinating direction for my mom to go in. When youre explaining Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to a child, you dont tell the kid that the songwriter was Johnny Marks. But my mom sat me down and explained this to me. A lot of things have happened in my life, but this one made a huge impression. And like I say, I wasnt even four years old.

Camptown Races I thought was an odd title, because it sounded like Doo Dah, Doo Dah. But there was a certain flavor to the song that I liked. Oh! Susanna was even better! I liked how they sounded. They seemed right. I dont know another way to say it, yet I have that feeling to this dayI feel the rightness of a song when its tight and works, from the words and music to the heart. I considered them amongst my favorite songs. So Stephen Foster became very important to me.

Just a mom, a kid, and a little record. I am still kind of dumbfounded and mystified by this. I have actually wondered if my mom had some kind of a planif she knew the gravity that this moment would have for me, each day deep into my life. The simple act of my mom saying to me, These songs were written by Stephen Foster, set a tone. Opened a door.

When something hits you that hard, even when youre three years old, you begin to watch for it, to crave it. And every time I heard about Stephen Foster, I took note of the song. Old Folks at Home (a.k.a. Swanee River). Old Black Joe. My Old Kentucky Home. Beautiful Dreamer. There were a lot of them. Over two hundred, Id learn later.

The stories, the pictures, the way the songs were toldI really took all that to heart. Fosters songs seemed historic, part of America. It was importantin the same way that Mark Twain became important to me. This stuff all felt like the bedrock of America, like the Mayflower, or the way that we grow corn in Indiana. These were things that I didnt realize as a kidwhatever it was, I just knew I really, really liked it.

So when it was time for me to evolve and be my own artist, there was Stephen Foster. Riverboats and the Mississippi I mean, Proud Mary couldve been written by Stephen! And then there was that moment when I realized that when I did that sort of thing, it was good. It resonated so strongly when I got it rightnot always immediately and sometimes even decades after a songs first inspiration hit me. I began to encourage myself to go deeper in that direction.

Now, if you had told me when I was fifteen and playing for drunks in some dive like the Monkey Inn that I was gonna somehow combine rock and roll with Stephen Foster, I wouldve told you that you were crazy.

People would listen to my songs and ask, Where does this come from? I had trouble explaining that. I hadnt 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. Still does.

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 hed ever been to the South. There were other parallels between our lives. Stephen was tricked out of his royalties. And there were parallels that could have been. Foster ended up alcoholic and dying in poverty at the age of thirty-seven. A pretty sad but typical tale. And if it hadnt been for my wife, Julie, that wouldve been me.

I didnt get into music to get girls. Or to become famous. Or rich. Those things never even occurred to me. I got into music because of music. I just loved it. It was (and is) a mystical, magical thing. I just wanted to write songs, good songs, great songs, ones that Stephen Foster might not cringe at. Proud Mary, Born on the Bayou, Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Lodi, Wholl Stop the Rain, Green River, Fortunate Sonchances are you might know a few of those.

Now, if youre familiar with that last song you might be surprised to see it as the title of my autobiographyFortunate Son has even been used for the title of a biography of George W. Bush! So how do those two words apply to me? The best way I can illustrate that is by sharing a story about something that happened recentlyon Veterans Day.

I was performing on a broadcast called