The interesting thing I came to realize after (unironically) listening to CCR for several years is that most of what John Fogerty was singing about was a 60s California kid's Tolkienesque fantasy of what life in the south would be like in some undefined golden era. Green River and Proud Mary are epitomes of this. Did John Fogerty ever have a hound dog or see the Mississippi before traveling there to play a concert? I'm not saying it's bad music, but his work was far more fantasy than autobiography.
The funny thing is, I've seen southern 'react' kids (Andy and Alex) listen to Born On The Bayou for the first time.
If you know the song you know what's gonna happen and you can't wait, but even then it's a delight: you know from the first downbeat it's got you, but seeing these kids light up and lose their minds over how good it is, that's something special.
It so doesn't matter that John Fogerty was singing a fantasy: real Southern kids connected to the reality of what Fogerty was doing, what he and the band were making. There's nothing inauthentic about 'Born On The Bayou'. It's made out of love and it's real and sincere. Maybe if you actually got born on the bayou you'd take it for granted and would never be able to express so deep a love, and you'd be singing about coding in silicon valley?
A friend once summed it up nicely this way: "I love CCR but dude I was so bummed when I learned they weren't actually swamp people, they just wrote songs about being swamp people."
On the other hand, you don't necessarily have to see something first hand in order to be able to channel its energy into art. There are plenty of great paintings based on secondhand descriptions of events and locations. Or consider the song "Country Roads"!
Which admittedly could have inspired the stories he sang about, but even so there were no paddlewheel steamships in that river when he was there. If there was a "river culture" he didn't give us a clear accounting of it. Maybe it was a metaphor for more landlocked counterculture society at the time?
Aware harder. CCR is part of a larger whole. A whole with depth and breadth. By the early 80’s The Minutemen recognized CCR and Bob Dylan in there political song writing, But there were other contemporaries of CCR as well with philosophical and virtuoso depth
Several come to mind: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Ralph McTell. The list tends towards singer-songwriters, though. Bands? Maybe Procol Harum.
