Proud Mary

Fogerty wrote it after his discharge from the Army Reserve. He turned cartwheels on the lawn, picked up his guitar, and by the time he reached the Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river line, he knew he had written his best song. It began as a story about a maid who works for rich people. Cook added the riverboat from a line on the TV show Maverick, and Fogerty did not see the Mississippi until after recording, in Memphis. The opening drop from C to A was modeled on Beethoven's Fifth, and he described his solo as an attempt to be Steve Cropper. According to Joel Selvin's liner notes for the 2008 reissue, it was arranged from parts of different songs, one about a washerwoman named Mary. The line about rollin' on the river came from a Will Rogers movie. Fogerty wanted the vocals to recall male gospel harmonies such as those of the Swan Silvertones, the Sensational Nightingales and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. The basic track was cut by the four at RCA Studios in Hollywood, and John overdubbed other instruments and all the vocals later.

Released as a single around the turn of 1969 with Born on the Bayou on the B-side, it peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 in March 1969, the first of five CCR singles to stop there. It reached No. 8 in the UK. Recording it brought the band close to splitting, with Fogerty saying they could have broken up right there over the backing vocals.

Covers

The song has been recorded in more than a hundred versions. Solomon Burke took it into the Hot 100 in 1969, as did the Checkmates Ltd., featuring Sonny Charles, in a Phil Spector production. Ike & Tina Turner reached No. 4 in March 1971 and won a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Group. Bob Dylan called it his favorite song of 1969.

Burke released his version on Bell Records in April 1969, recording it at Muscle Shoals. It reached No. 15 on the R&B chart, and he sang it on American Bandstand on 24 May 1969. Fogerty said that Burke had crawled up inside his head to learn what the song was about. The Checkmates arrangement was by Perry Botkin Jr. and Dee Barton. Ike Turner and Soko Richardson substantially rearranged the song for the Turners' album Workin' Together, which reached No. 5 on the R&B chart. Elvis Presley began playing it in concert in 1970, and Prince sampled it in his Super Bowl XLI halftime show in 2007. Rolling Stone ranked the original No. 155 on its 2004 list of the greatest songs, and both the Creedence and Turner recordings entered the Grammy Hall of Fame, in 1998 and 2003.

Live

It was in the Woodstock set and in the Royal Albert Hall show of April 1970. When Fogerty ended his ban on playing CCR songs at the Palomino Club in 1987, he did so with this one, after Dylan told him that otherwise everyone would think it was a Tina Turner song. Fogerty also objected publicly when a 2018 film took the title.