Born on the Bayou

It opens Bayou Country and was the B-side of Proud Mary. Fogerty used a Gibson ES-175 with tremolo in the intro, a guitar that was stolen from his car soon after. The song is set in a swamp where he had never lived, and he said it is about chasing down a hoodoo, a magical, mystical, spiritual apparition he could not define. He first saw a bayou in 1969, when John Fred took him to Bayou Forche near Baton Rouge. He told American Songwriter in 2013 that it came to him late at night as he stared at a blank wall in his sparse apartment, with the ringing sound of his amp pulling him in. He drew on the old film Swamp Fever and on bayou imagery absorbed from the media, and in 1970 he said some of the imagery came from Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. The Pitchfork writer John Lingan cites it as the point where Fogerty began to summon a mythic rock and roll South.

The sources disagree about where the riff came from. Fogerty says it came during a soundcheck at the Avalon Ballroom in 1968, while Clifford says it was the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Clifford called it his favorite CCR record and said it was meant to be the A-side. It was the first song of the Woodstock set, at about 3:30 in the morning. Ultimate Classic Rock ranks it the second best CCR song, and the Foo Fighters have covered it.