Creedence Clearwater Revival

Creedence Clearwater Revival came from El Cerrito, California — not the Mississippi Delta — but John Fogerty’s writing and guitar playing summoned the South with such conviction that listeners assumed it. The sound was built from the same materials as early rock ‘n’ roll: Chuck Berry guitar riffs, R&B rhythms, the blues vocabulary of the Delta — but played with a directness and economy that felt explicitly counter to the psychedelic sprawl happening around them in the Bay Area.

Between 1968 and 1970 they released five albums and a string of singles that defined classic rock radio before the term existed: “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Green River,” “Fortunate Son,” “Down on the Corner,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” The songs were short, hook-driven, politically direct (Fogerty, never drafted despite the Vietnam draft, wrote anti-war songs from a working-class perspective) and aimed at the AM radio listener rather than the album-rock listener.

Fogerty had total creative control, which generated internal resentment from his bandmates — his brother Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. The band dissolved in 1972 in acrimony, and John Fogerty spent the following decades in legal disputes over his catalog and publishing rights. For this graph CCR represent the moment when American rock reclaimed its roots — blues, country and R&B — from British Invasion revisionism.