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Rocker John Fogerty is sharing the story behind a unique songwriting experience.
In a video shared on YouTube, the Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman, 80, talked about the creation of one of the band’s most memorable hits, “Fortunate Son.” Fogerty opened up about how “This song is unusual in a couple of ways.”
“First of all, it’s a song that’s probably took the longest for me to write. And, at the same time, was also the quickest song I ever wrote. It’s also, some say, a political song. Now, for that part, we gotta go way, way back to when I was in the second grade.”
Fogerty recalls watching the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. The songwriter remembered watching “a whole bunch of big, black limousines coming down the road” and remembered it feeling “suspicious.”
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“Even at that young age, I was a little bit suspicious, let’s say, of people driving around in fancy big black cars. I guess it piqued my interest in politics because over the years, I would watch these conventions on television. They were pretty boring, but every now and then, somebody’d get up and say, ‘Well, the great state of Texas would like to nominate her favorite son, Billie Sol Estes,’ or something like that.”
He continued, “The idea of the ‘favorite son’ kind of stuck in my mind. I was at the lower end of the economic scale, you might say, so I was a little suspicious of powerful and rich people.”
Fogerty felt the feeling again as the country watched the development of the Vietnam War.
“Like many, many young men my age, I was drafted in 1966. Eventually, I ended up in an Army Reserve unit, and that was great, but at the same time, you’re seeing these stories on television where some Senator managed to get his son out of the draft or some rich tycoon millionaire was able to have your son avoid military service, and that just didn’t seem fair.”
In the summer of 1969, Fogerty returned to the idea of the “favorite son” and started writing a song by that name.
“And I’m thinking about all these things, these political things, these economic things, these unfair class things that are going on in our culture. I started putting the music together and showing my band, of course. And as we rehearse for a few weeks, we start to get pretty tight, and I realize we’re going to record pretty soon, I better actually sit down and write the words of this song.”
Fogerty sat down with a legal pad in his bedroom and worked through his thoughts, “And somewhere in that process, the idea switched to ‘Fortunate Son.'”
“And man, all those thoughts just came out in a raging torrent. Twenty minutes later, after walking into the room with nothing, I walked out of that room with a completed song called ‘Fortunate Son.’ That was by far the quickest I’ve ever written a song.”
