“Proud Mary” becomes a New Orleans street parade in this version—an old riverboat hymn reborn as communal joy, where memory, survival, and sheer vocal fire all “keep on rollin’.”
When John Fogerty returned to “Proud Mary” with Jennifer Hudson, and invited Allen Toussaint plus the Rebirth Brass Band into the room, he wasn’t simply revisiting a classic—he was re-situating it. This recording belongs to Fogerty’s star-studded 2013 collaboration album Wrote a Song for Everyone, released May 28, 2013, with “Proud Mary” serving as its closing statement. It’s a fascinating choice to place it at the very end: as if Fogerty is saying, after all the guests and all the re-lit memories, here is the song that still carries the heaviest river current.
The story behind this particular remake begins in New Orleans, where Fogerty and Hudson recorded the track in a local studio session in June 2012, with Allen Toussaint helping shape the arrangement and playing piano, and the Rebirth Brass Band adding the city’s unmistakable brass-and-streetbeat spirit. That detail isn’t trivia—it’s the soul of the performance. “Proud Mary” has always been a song about motion, escape, and the pull of a mythic South. Bringing it into New Orleans doesn’t just “decorate” the tune; it reconnects the song to the cultural bloodstream it always admired from afar.
To appreciate why this remake feels so alive, you have to remember what “Proud Mary” was at birth. Written by Fogerty and first recorded by Creedence Clearwater Revival, it emerged at the start of 1969 (sources disagree on the exact day, but the single was being discussed and reviewed in early January). The original became a major hit, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1969, a signature CCR chart story that somehow feels perfectly “almost-but-not-quite”—like a riverboat that never stops long enough to be crowned, because it’s always moving on.
Now listen to what happens when Jennifer Hudson enters that history. Hudson doesn’t merely “guest vocal.” She arrives with that church-trained power—an ability to make a single phrase feel like testimony. In her voice, the song’s famous travelogue becomes something deeper than scenery: leaving “the city” and finding the river isn’t only geography; it’s deliverance. And Fogerty, older and more weathered than the 1969 version’s hungry young narrator, sounds less like a man fantasizing about the river and more like a man who understands why people need it—why rolling on is sometimes the only way to survive.
Then there’s Allen Toussaint, a name that carries an entire universe of New Orleans music—piano that can smile while telling the truth, arrangements that know how to make a groove feel like a conversation. His presence links Fogerty’s swamp-rock imagination to the city’s real musical language. And the Rebirth Brass Band turns the track into something communal—less “classic rock single,” more second-line procession. You can almost picture it: the song no longer riding a riverboat alone, but moving through crowded streets where everyone contributes a clap, a shout, a step.
The meaning of “Proud Mary” has always lived in its paradox: it’s upbeat, almost playful, yet it contains a working-class ache—an insistence that life is hard, and therefore movement is holy. A recent retrospective even emphasizes how Fogerty wrote a mythic Southern landscape despite limited firsthand travel at the time, and how the song’s imaginative geography became part of its lasting spell. This 2013 version quietly resolves that tension: by anchoring the performance in New Orleans musicianship, the myth and the real world finally shake hands.
And if you want the most important “ranking” fact for this remake’s era: the album Wrote a Song for Everyone debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, Fogerty’s highest-charting debut. That matters not because charts are everything, but because it proves something tender: even decades later, people still wanted to hear him reclaim these songs in his own voice—this time, not alone, but surrounded.
In the end, “Proud Mary (with Jennifer Hudson, feat. Allen Toussaint and Rebirth Brass Band)” feels like a celebration with a bruise under it—the kind of music that smiles because it remembers what it took to keep smiling. It’s the sound of a classic learning a new accent, a river song finding its streetbeat, and John Fogerty—still stubbornly vital—letting the world know that the old wheel keeps turning, and the best songs… keep on rollin’.