What are you listening to?

I'm fortunate to have been able to play guitar, tenor banjo, and mandolin rhythm section parts with small pit to large orchestras. This stuff fascinates me how it evokes specific feelings in a piece.

 
After shoveling wet snow this morning, I headed out to SL No. 7. Instead of hike across snow covered shrub steppe I found the path wet from rain, muddy even. I got skunked. Not a bite, not a bobber down, not a take, nothing. Otter scat, two coyotes, one pheasant. Ducks and geese. Not a wasted trip, just skunked. On the drive home, Etta James singing "I'll Be Seeing You" came on; she sure could sing!

 
I was reading some older N. California fishing reports and stumbled upon Putah Creek. Said Fogerty had written about this creek. I had to go down the rabbit hole and find out if true or not. I had no idea this body of water is the basis for ‘Green River’ by CCR.

Pulled from Farout magazine article below

In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, John Fogerty explained how ‘Green River’ originated. He revealed that the song wasn’t written with the south in mind at all. The inspiration was drawn from much closer to home.

Fogerty said: “What really happened is that I used a setting like New Orleans, but I would actually be talking about thing 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.”

He continued: “It wasn’t called Green River, but in my mind, I always sort of called it Green River. 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.”


Elucidating on the origins of ‘Green River’, in a 1993 interview with the same publication, Fogerty counted that the “actual specific reference, ‘Green River,’ I got from a soda pop-syrup label… My flavour was called Green River.”

A legendary track, and not inspired by the American south at all, it’s a testament to John Fogerty‘s songwriting skill. He could appropriate the sounds of a specific area and mould them in his own image, helping him to bring back the heady memories of his childhood in California…..

 
 
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