1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 137. Creedance Clearwater Revival – Bayou County (1969)

 

Ugh, that cover induces motion sickness.

Despite coming from California, this album is very much themed around New Orleans and Louisiana. Opening with the country-rock track Born to the Bayou, and also featuring a more R&B track that Tina Turner took and ran away with – Proud Mary, the name of a Mississippi river boat.

The rest of the album is some crunchy blues-rock including the extended jams of Graveyard Train (the most bluesiest title there ever was and, yes, it does include that blues staple of a harmonica mimicking a train whistle), and Keep on Chooglin’. I’m not sure how one choogles, but the jump-blues bass line to this I guess encourages that particular action.

You can draw a through-line from BB King through John Mayall, to Creedance Clearwater Revival, possibly diverting en route to Cream, and you can see how the blues form has become more loose and more rocky as time has gone on. Singer John Fogerty’s voice (another one of those that invokes laryngitis just hearing it) is made for this kind of music, and it’s funny how they manage to really evoke a feel of the sweaty Deep South while not having grown up or lived there. It somehow sounds more New Orleans-y than Dr John, who is from there.

Oh yeah, and I almost didn’t notice, but we’re now in 1969, a year that will see Nixon become President of the USA, Colonel Gaddafi become leader of Libya, the Soyuz docking, Apollo 11 and 12 Moon landings, Stonewall Riots, moves to end the war in Vietnam, Woodstock, and right at the very end, my birth. Meanwhile, the music is sounding more and more Seventies in style.