Love tends to be one of the most common tropes in songwriting, no matter the genre or decade. But for classic rock icon John Fogerty, he didn’t write his first love song until the late 1990s, long after he wrote and released some of the most iconic rock cuts of all time, like “Born On The Bayou”, “Run From The Jungle”, and “Fortunate Son”. So, what took him so long?
In his memoir, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, Fogerty said he never wrote love songs early in his career because he “didn’t write that way. Those kinds of songs seemed generic and meaningless to me. I was trying to write something that mattered. I’d written some love songs as a teenager. But in the Creedence era, I just stopped, because I didn’t believe in that.”
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Of course, Fogerty found it easier to believe in love once he found the right person: his wife, Julie. The couple wed in 1991. By 1997, Fogerty had his first-ever love song to put on his fifth solo album, Blue Moon Swamp. He titled the track “Joy Of My Life”, after how he often described his wife to others.
John Fogerty Dedicated His First Love Song to a Widow (Kind Of)
John Fogerty got the inspiration to write a song about his wife, ironically, while his wife wasn’t around. In Fortunate Son, Fogerty described a conversation he had with a friend about the fact that whenever this friend asked Fogerty how his wife was doing, the musician would reply, “Well, she’s the joy of my life.” One day, Fogerty said, his friend suggested he write a song using that phrase. Some time later, Fogerty was lying in bed, next to his wife, when the song truly began to take form. “It just flowed,” the singer-songwriter remembered.
Fogerty wrote his first love song, “Joy Of My Life”, on a dobro, which added a bit of ironic humor to the story. “For three and a half years I played dobro,” Fogerty wrote. “I got really manic about getting good, because I knew I wanted that thing on my record. So much so that I called Julie the dobro widow. I’d be practicing in my little room, and she couldn’t tell if I was getting better.”
Blue Moon Swamp performed moderately well in the United States, peaking at No. 37 on the Billboard 200. Two and a half decades later, Chris Stapleton earned a Top 40 country hit with his version of Fogerty’s first love song.
Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
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