After three years of drought, California this winter has been inundated with rain — an “atmospheric river” dumped 13 inches on the central part of the state in the past few days, leading to widespread flooding and mudslides.
John Fogerty was raised on the east side of the San Francisco Bay in Contra Costa County, which averages just 21 inches of precipitation a year, but rain figures prominently in some of his best-known songs. Though it’s partly a political song, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” was inspired — the last verse, in particular –by the original Woodstock concert. In 2007 Fogerty told a concert crowd, “I went up there and saw a whole bunch of really nice young people. Hairy. Colorful. It started to rain, and got really muddy, and then half a million people took their clothes off! Boomer generation making its presence known, I guess. Anyway, then I went home and wrote this song.”
In the sci-fi TV series “Under the Dome,” musician and actor Dwight Yoakam’s character sings a verse of the song a cappella. He subsequently recorded the tune and released it as a single.
