One of our summer camp activities was Group Sing, an American Idol-like competition in which teams made up of each age group performed song parodies about how wonderful they are, written by their counselors. Amy and Maury Stein were the camp’s owners and our Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson, watching and listening to each song and deciding which was the winning team. (Is that how American Idol works? I‘ve never seen it.)
My group’s counselors wrote a song based on “Proud Mary.” They asked me to play the part of Tina Turner. In the spoken word intro of the Ike & Tina Turner version of the song, she says “We never evah do nothin’ nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough.” I said that describing the Inter-C’s, our group. When the song kicked into high gear I shimmied and whipped my hair with abandon. It’s like my counselors saw something in eight-year-old me that I wouldn’t realize until years later. Proud Mary indeed!
Today the writer of “Proud Mary,” John Fogerty, celebrates his 70th birthday. Here are twenty of his best:
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