Untitled - Concord Music Group

In many ways, Willy and the Poor Boys is a snapshot of the band’s
entire history. “Down on the Corner” is about the love of playing, pure
and simple: a band like the one in the cover photograph, playing on the
corner for nickles. It recapitulates Creedence’s history as (among other
things) Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets, a band that played for
low wages and all the beer they could drink, churning out the Top 40
in bars and places the band had already memorialized in the song
“Lodi.”
“Cotton Fields” and “Midnight Special” come from the songbook of
Leadbelly, Huddie Ledbetter, the black ex-convict whose adoption by
the earliest proponents of the American folk revival in the 1930s and
’40s brought a huge body of African American blues and pre-blues
music into the mainstream. Fogerty’s mother was a big-time folk fan
and often dragged her enthusiastic child to folk gatherings and concerts
in Berkeley.
“Feelin’ Blue,” I could have sworn, was a cover of an Ike and
Tina Turner song, but it’s not. Instead, it’s a fine example of how the