Song of the Day 8/5: Canned Heat, “Going Up the Country”

California hippie-rockers Canned Heat, founded by blues aficionados Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, had their biggest US hit with this tune. It became an anthem for the back-to-the-country movement that became popular during the chaotic year 1968. The song reached No. 11 at the end of the year, but it’s been associated with summer ever since the band played it at Woodstock and the theatrical film gave it prominent placement (because the festival was held “up the country,” get it?)

That’s the common interpretation of the lyrics that Wilson wrote and sang, but some have discerned a more topical meaning. They claim this verse is about dodging the draft:

Now baby, pack your leaving trunk, you know we’ve got to leave today
Just exactly where we’re going I cannot say, but
We might even leave the USA
‘Cause there’s a brand new game that I don’t want to play

The video shows the band lip-synching the song and having a goof — Hite is pretending to play Jim Horn’s flute part. The clip says it’s from 1970; Wilson died later that year of a barbiturate overdose at age 27. Within a month Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were also dead at the same age, establishing rock’s 27 Club. Hite died in 1981 but the band, down to one original member, is still active.

Wilson lifted both the melody and the flute part from “Bull-Doze Blues,” a song by itinerant bluesman Henry Thomas, who accompanied himself on a folk instrument known as the quills — essentially pan-pipes. He didn’t record it until 1928.

Notice that Thomas never mentions the country, so where did Wilson get the title phrase? Probably from Wingy Manone, who in 1927 recorded an arrangement with new lyrics by his pianist, Johnny Miller, that slowed the tempo for the foxtrot. The new title was “Up the Country.”