Photo: Persson/Redferns/Retna

Born May 28th, 1945 Key Tracks "Bad Moon Rising," "Fortunate Son," "Proud Mary" Influenced Bob Seger, Ronnie Van Zant, John Mellencamp

The backwoods yowl that put the fire into Creedence Clearwater Revival's gritty late-Sixties hits like "Green River" and "Proud Mary" actually was not, as the man says, born on the bayou. John Fogerty's abrasive baritone didn't even come naturally at first. "In '64, I got a job playing in a club, and I had a tape recorder with me," he recalls. "I would record the whole night and then listen to myself back, and every day I would try to force myself to get that sound that was in my head." He was trying to channel the voices of blues singers like Howlin' Wolf and Bo Diddley that he heard on the radio in his hometown of El Cerrito, California. "As a kid, there was that point I realized the stuff I liked was more dangerous than the stuff my parents liked," he says. "It was that threatening sound."

1. Bad Moon Rising
2. Fortunate Son
3. Proud Mary

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