John Fogerty didn’t have to try too hard to muster up the feeling behind the classic Creedence Clearwater Revival track ‘Green River’. While he often used swamp imagery and bayou references in his work, despite himself never having lived outside of California for too long, Fogerty found that the music and words to ‘Green River’ came naturally.
“More common is me fooling around on the guitar coming up with a riff or a lick or even just a tone which sparks some kind of creativity,” Fogerty told Mojo about the song’s conception. “Your mind gets a vibe, like the lick for ‘Green River’ – that’s what it sounded like, a green river, ha ha. And that was a title I had carried around since I was about eight years old.”
But was the titular “green river” an actual place? As it turns out, the answer was yes. Fogerty didn’t have to make up tales of riverboats or jungles to write ‘Green River’. He had real childhood memories from a river in Northern California that Fogerty frequented as a kid.
“Green River is really about this place where I used to go as a kid on Putah Creek, near Winters, California,” Fogerty explained on VH1 Storytellers. “I went there with my family every year until I was ten. A lot of happy memories there. I learned how to swim there. There was a rope hanging from the tree. Certainly dragonflies, bullfrogs. There was a little cabin we would stay in owned by a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody. That’s the reference in the song to Cody Jr.”
“The actual specific reference, Green River, I got from a soda pop-syrup label. You used to be able to go into a soda fountain, and they had these bottles of flavored syrup. My flavor was called Green River,” Fogerty added. “It was green, lime flavored, and they would empty some out over some ice and pour some of that soda water on it, and you had yourself a Green River.”
Fogerty reiterated the song’s origin story to Rolling Stone in 2012. “What really happened is that I used a setting like New Orleans, but I would actually be talking about things from my own life. Certainly a song like ‘Green River’ – which you may think would fit seamlessly into the Bayou vibe, but it’s actually about the Green River, as I named it – it was actually called Putah Creek by Winters, California.”
“It wasn’t called Green River, but in my mind I always sort of called it Green River,” Fogerty claimed. “All those little anecdotes are part of my childhood, those are things that happened to me actually, I just wrote about them and the audience shifted at the time and place.”
Check out ‘Green River’ down below.
