“The Night Time Is the Right Time” is CCR slipping into old R&B clothes and making them fit perfectly—an after-hours promise that the daylight world can’t police.
By the time Creedence Clearwater Revival closed their 1969 album Green River with “The Night Time Is the Right Time,” they were already masters of something rare: sounding timeless without sounding like a museum. This track isn’t one of John Fogerty’s originals—it’s a respectful, hard-swinging salute to rhythm-and-blues tradition—but the way CCR plays it tells you exactly who they were becoming. Not merely a rock band with hits, but a band with roots so deep you could almost hear the soil on them.
Here’s the essential, accurate framework. “The Night Time Is the Right Time” appears as the closing track on Green River (released August 1969), listed on Side Two, Track Five, running about 3:09. The songwriting credit for CCR’s recording is not Fogerty—it’s credited to Nappy Brown, Ozzie Cadena, and Lew Herman. The song was not released as a single, so it has no individual chart peak; its “ranking” story belongs to the album that carried it. And that album mattered in a big way: Green River reached No. 1 on the US Billboard 200, confirming CCR as an American center of gravity in a chaotic year.
That context changes how the performance lands. In 1969, CCR were not chasing the psychedelic sprawl that surrounded them. They were chasing focus—tight songs, clear grooves, emotional directness. The same record that gave the world “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” (both major hits) also made room for this older R&B number at the very end, as if to say: before we leave you, remember where the heartbeat came from.
The song’s backstory is part of the pleasure. The title has a long lineage in blues and R&B, with notable mid-century versions including Nappy Brown’s “The Right Time” and Ray Charles’s famous rendition “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.” CCR’s take is commonly understood as leaning on the spirit of the Ray Charles tradition—the call-and-response electricity, the sense of a room coming alive after dark—even if CCR translate that energy into their own lean, guitar-driven language.
What makes “The Night Time Is the Right Time” feel so alive in CCR’s hands is that they don’t treat it like a “cover.” They treat it like a working song—something you play because it moves people. The groove is sturdy, uncluttered, and relentless in the best way, like a good bar band that knows the dance floor doesn’t care about your theory. Fogerty sings it with conviction rather than imitation. He isn’t trying to be Ray Charles. He’s trying to be honest—honest about the simple, universal message at the center: the night offers permission. Permission to want, to sweat, to laugh, to reach for somebody without the daylight’s judgment following you home.
And there’s something quietly poignant about placing this song at the end of Green River. After all the album’s motion—moonlit warnings, restless roads, uneasy desires—CCR ends on a communal ritual: voices answering voices, rhythm answering need. It’s as if, after a long year and a loud world, the band is reminding you that joy can still be physical, ordinary, and shared. Not a grand solution—just a few minutes where the body remembers it can survive by moving.
“The Night Time Is the Right Time” didn’t need chart numbers to earn its place. It earned it by being the album’s final handshake, the last look over the shoulder before the lights go out. If Green River is often remembered for its radio thunder, this track is the after-hours glow—proof that behind CCR’s hits was a deep affection for the Black American music that taught rock and roll how to breathe.