Bayou Country

Recorded in October 1968 with engineer Hank McGill, it set seven songs in a swamp of Fogerty's imagination, and he has pointed to Born on the Bayou as the key tying its imagery together. The riffs for Proud Mary, Born on the Bayou and Keep on Chooglin' were conceived at a concert at the Avalon Ballroom, according to Joel Selvin's liner notes for the 2008 reissue. Fogerty told Rolling Stone in 1993 that making the record brought a real confrontation, and in Uncut in 2012 he recalled the fight over the backing vocals on Proud Mary, saying they could have broken up right there.

Fogerty told Pitchfork in 2007 that the band was on the tiniest label in the world, with no manager or publicist, so he had to do it with the music, as he felt the Beatles had. Proud Mary was arranged from parts of different songs, one of them about a washerwoman named Mary, and the line about rollin' on the river came from a Will Rogers movie. Born on the Bayou came to him late at night as he stared at the blank wall of his sparse apartment. He has said he built the swamp from what he knew through the media, including the old film Swamp Fever, and in 1970 he told Pop Chronicles that the song was vaguely like Porterville, a mythical childhood in a heat-filled Fourth of July. The album also holds Little Richard's Good Golly Miss Molly, with Fogerty singing a changed line about a kiss and a ting-a-ling-a-ling, and Keep On Chooglin', which became a concert show-stopper. Doug Clifford has said the four jammed every day and that the others got no credit for what came out of it.

It reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and went Gold in December 1970 and 2x Platinum in December 1990. Rolling Stone in 1969 found it inconsistent, with good cuts that were very good and bad ones that did not make it. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave it four and a half stars and wrote that Born on the Bayou reveals the extent of Fogerty's myth-making. The 2008 reissue was scored three and a half stars by Rolling Stone, and the album appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.