I thought in those terms, perhaps like Hoagy Carmichael or maybe Leiber and Stoller or, God knows, Lennon and McCartney. Sitting there in my living room with the piece of paper that had the words on it, I was literally shaking with the understanding that this was really a classic.
I had sort of an epiphany, and I ended up writing most of that song within an hour’s time. That’s why writing “Proud Mary” was such a big deal in my life, because I understood what it was immediately. I tried to write songs as I was growing up, and when I say try, I’m sheepishly admitting that they weren’t very good. It certainly had a lot of effect on the rest of my life, just because of that one little thing. She had guessed already that I was pretty musical, because I would dance around and hum songs and learn the words, but it’s still a remarkable thing that happened in my life. That’s such an unusual thing for any mom to do. That little gesture, I think, instilled sort of a sense of what we now call Americana in me, and it also made me, a 3-and-a-half-year-old, aware of songwriters. My mother sat me down when I was 3 and a half and played me a Stephen Foster record - one side was “O Susanna” and the other side was “Camptown Races” - and explained to me that Stephen Foster was the songwriter of both songs. You take songwriting very personally, maybe even more so than a lot of other writers. But that’s not my frame of mind, certainly at the moment, anyway. I understand other people, especially older people, wanting to sell. To finally own “Proud Mary” is a big deal. It has been such a wrong use of music business law, all these years. It is ironic, certainly, that everybody else is selling and I end up buying my songs, but of course it makes perfect sense. You must have considered the irony of how other veteran singer-songwriters are jumping over each other to sell their song catalogs for big bucks, and here you are, seemingly the lone guy working to buy yours back.
IT TIME FOR CHANGE SONG BRADY BUNCH FULL
Fogerty laid the whole journey out for Variety, from purgatorial beginning and middle to near-fairy-tale ending, so that the tale can finally been seen in its full arc… and serve as a cautionary tale for any musicians too eager to sign on a dotted line. The story of Fogerty’s epic battle with Fantasy Records’ former owner, the late Saul Zaentz, has been oft-told over the years, but only now can it be recounted in full with the happy ending the performer long wished for. “Finally getting ownership of my songs now, you can see it’s correcting something that has been wrong in my life for most of my life -you know, since my early twenties,” says Fogerty, now 77. That is, not until his wife and manager, Julie Fogerty, and a very high-profile advisor, Irving Azoff, came up with the idea of negotiating a deal that would leave the singer-songwriter as the primary owner while still letting Concord (parent company of Fantasy Records) maintain a vested interest. rights were about to revert to him anyway, after 56 years since the signing of his original contract, per American copyright law, but he wanted to control the catalog globally, as well, which was not in store for him. In early January, Fogerty announced that he had made a deal with Concord Music Group to purchase a majority interest, worldwide, in the Creedence catalog. That poster boy for disenfranchisement is now a happy man, from all indications.
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