Bayou Country is the second studio album by American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, released by Fantasy Records in January 1969, and was the first of three albums CCR released in that year. Bayou Country reached number 7 on Billboard album chart and produced the band's first No. 2 hit single, "Proud Mary". Background After ten years of struggling as the Blue Velvets and the Golliwogs, singer/guitarist John Fogerty, his brother guitarist Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford scored a No. 11 hit single with "Susie Q" in June 1968 under the name Creedence Clearwater Revival. Their self-titled album peaked at No. 52 on the Billboard albums chart. 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. "There was a point at which we had done the first album. Everybody had listened to my advice. I don't think anybody thought too much about it," Fogerty recalled to Michael Goldberg of Rolling Stone in 1993. "But in making the second album, Bayou Country, we had a real confrontation. Everybody wanted to sing, write, make up their own arrangements, whatever, right? This was after ten years of struggling. Now we had the spotlight. Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. 'Susie Q' was as big as we'd ever seen. Of course, it really wasn't that big...I didn't want to go back to the carwash." 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. We basically had none of the usual star-making machinery, so I said to myself I'm just going to have to do it with the music...Basically I wanted to do what the Beatles had done. I sensed that I just had to do it myself." Composition Bayou Country contains what is arguably John Fogerty's most heralded composition, "Proud Mary", which peaked at No. 2 on the singles chart. In a 1969 interview, Fogerty said that he wrote it in the two days after he was discharged from the National Guard. In the liner notes for the 2008 expanded reissue of Bayou Country, Joel Selvin explained that the riffs for "Proud Mary", "Born on the Bayou", and "Keep on Chooglin'" were conceived by