How John Fogerty’s Upbringing Inspired “Fortunate Son” (And Why It Made Him “Suspicious” of Powerful People)

In 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival released “Fortunate Son”. The song, written solely by lead singer John Fogerty, remains one of the group’s most commercially successful songs.

On the band’s Willy And The Poor Boys album, “Fortunate Son” says in part, “Some folks are born silver spoon in hand / Lord, don’t they help themselves, oh / But when the taxman come to the door / Lord, the house lookin’ like a rummage sale, yeah.”

Surprisingly, Fogerty had the idea for what became “Fortunate Son” in 1953, when he was in second grade, watching the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. 

“Even at that young age, I was a little bit suspicious, let’s say, of people driving around in fancy big black cars,” Fogerty later remembered. “I guess it piqued my interest in politics because over the years, I would watch these conventions on television. They were pretty boring, but every now and then, somebody’d get up and say, ‘Well, the great state of Texas would like to nominate her favorite son, Billie Sol Estes,’ or something like that.”

How Income Played a Role in John Fogerty Writing “Fortunate Son” for Creedence Clearwater Revival

Once Fogerty heard the term “favorite son,” he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“The idea of the ‘favorite son’ kind of stuck in my mind,” Fogerty recounts. “I was at the lower end of the economic scale, you might say, so I was a little suspicious of powerful and rich people.”

Later, the Vietnam War also helped shape what became “Fortunate Son”.

“Like many, many young men my age, I was drafted in 1966,” Fogerty shares. “Eventually, I ended up in an Army Reserve unit, and that was great, but at the same time, you’re seeing these stories on television where some Senator managed to get his son out of the draft or some rich tycoon millionaire was able to have your son avoid military service, and that just didn’t seem fair.”

Of course, Fogerty later changed the term to “fortunate son.” In 2015, Fogerty released his autobiography, also called Fortunate Son. In the book, he opens up about the impact of this Creedence Clearwater Revival hit.

“To my mind, if I’m writing a song, it probably means there’s going to be some work to it,” Fogerty said. “‘Fortunate Son’ was written in twenty minutes, but darn few are like that. And I’d probably been thinking about everything that was in that song for three or four years. I didn’t know it would start, ‘Some folks are born…’ – that came from nowhere. But the thought process had been going on for a long time.”

Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns