Despite their new-found success, however, seeds of discontent among the four members had already been planted due to John Fogerty assuming control of the band at just about every level.
In 2007, the singer elaborated to Joshua Klein of Pitchfork, "I determined, we're on the tiniest record label in the world, there's no money behind us, we don't have a manager, there's no publicist.
The song was acclaimed almost immediately, with Solomon Burke scoring a minor hit with it in 1969 and a radically rearranged version appearing on Ike and Tina Turner's 1971 LP Workin' Together.
In 2012, Fogerty recalled to Uncut's David Cavanagh that he was extremely focused at the time, honing his songwriting with a single-mindedness that led to a proficient string of hits: I would sit in my little apartment - which was very sparse - and stare at the wall.
I was conjuring that place deep in my soul that was me.The swampy album opener "Born on the Bayou" was conceived in the same setting, with Fogerty explaining to Lynne Margolis of American Songwriter in 2013: And it’s the middle of the night, I’m looking at my blank wall and basically going into another dimension — whatever you do when you’re kind of meditating — and that whole sound, that ringing, the way my amp sounded was takin’ me in there, and right at that moment, I don’t know if I’d written it first on a piece of paper, but it collided in my brain with the phrase, born on the bayou... And I pulled everything I knew about it, which wasn’t much because I didn’t live there.
I loved an old movie called Swamp Fever...every other bit of southern bayou information that had entered my imagination from the time I was born, it all sort of collided in that meditation about that song.
I can’t tell you why.In 1970, Fogerty told Pop Chronicles, "'Born on the Bayou' was vaguely like 'Porterville,' about a mythical childhood and a heat-filled time, the Fourth of July.
Hoodoo is a magical, mystical, spiritual, non-defined apparition, like a ghost or a shadow, not necessarily evil, but certainly other-worldly.
Although not a concept album, Fogerty did acknowledge to Rolling Stone in 1993 that "Born on the Bayou" "is almost the Gordian knot or the key to what happened later.
I'm not crying over spilled milk, but when you really look at how prolific John was in the 3½ years that we had our success and the major drought he's had as a solo artist, I think it adds a little more credence...to what we contributed to the band."
The atmosphere behind the scenes was indeed worsening; in a 2012 article with Uncut's Tom Pinnock, Fogerty recalled, "We went into RCA in Hollywood, Studio A, to record Bayou Country in October.
I showed the other guys how to sing the backgrounds, having remembered what we'd sounded like on “Porterville”, which was very ragged, not melodious...And I heard our tape back, and I just went, “Nahhh, that’s not gonna work.” So we had a big fight over that...We literally coulda broke up right there."
In addition to the Fogerty originals, Bayou Country also features a version of Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly" with slightly changed lyrics; instead of the result of the gift of a diamond ring being, "When she hugs me, her kissin' make me ting-a-ling-a-ling," John Fogerty sang, "Would you pardon me a kissin' and a ting-a-ling-a-ling?
In an early review, Rolling Stone thought that the album suffered from a major fault of inconsistency.
Overall it considered the material in the album "not always strong, but Creedence Clearwater Revival plays with enough gusto to overcome this problem.
[17] On AllMusic the album received 4.5 stars (out of 5), with Stephen Thomas Erlewine stating: "Opening slowly with the dark, swampy "Born on the Bayou", Bayou Country reveals an assured Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that has found its voice between their first and second album.