"The Word 'Cartoon' Describes the Best Rock-and-Roll Songs"

"'John Henry' touches upon several themes that C.C.R. went on to explore, foremost among them the nostalgia for some lost agrarian past. But, of course, that same nostalgia was a founding theme of the South, where Albion's second sons sought to recreate, on the backs of black slaves, an imagined English arcadia. And if this vision was itself a sort of cartoon—a brutal and deadly one, with strange fruit hanging from the trees—an odd thing happened when you spread the cartoonish map of 'Born on the Bayou' across the partly real, partly imagined Southern landscape: you got a one-to-one ratio. The result was something like realism."

Alex Abramovich in The New Yorker talks with John Fogerty about songwriting inspiration.