A coal-black elegy made new—Fogerty carries Prine’s small-town farewell like a lantern through the dark
Start with the anchors. “Paradise”—the John Prine lament about a Kentucky town erased by strip-mining—opens John Fogerty’s 2009 covers set The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again. Issued September 1, 2009, the album reimagined Fogerty’s 1973 one-man Blue Ridge Rangers concept with a live, hand-picked band; it entered the Billboard 200 at No. 24 and reached No. 83 in Australia. Fogerty’s take on “Paradise” clocks around 3:50 and sets the tone for the whole record: reverent, unhurried, built on wood and wire rather than studio flash.
A few facts that matter to collectors and memory-keepers. The cut is Track 1 on Rides Again; credit lines for the album list a small corps of ace roots players (names like Buddy Miller, Greg Leisz, Dennis Crouch, Kenny Aronoff), and the entry for this track notes Jason Mowery on dobro—a warm, sighing voice inside the arrangement. Sessions ran at Village Recorders and Berkeley Street Studios in Santa Monica in October 2008, with Fogerty producing. The set also welcomed friends (a “Garden Party” cameo by Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmit among them), but “Paradise” is pure front-porch: the band breathes, the lyric leads.
To understand why this performance lands so deep, remember the song’s story. Prine wrote “Paradise” for his 1971 debut as a quiet indictment of surface mining’s toll on Muhlenberg County, Kentucky—name-checking Peabody and the vanished coal town itself, and asking, in one of great American lines, to have his ashes float down the Green River. It’s a postcard from a place the map can’t quite hold anymore. Fogerty has called the song a touchstone for anyone who bristles when “corporations get to run roughshod” over ordinary people—a sentiment that makes his voice a natural vessel for it.
How Fogerty sings it. He doesn’t decorate; he steadies. The tempo is porch-swing easy, with the dobro’s glassy moan tracing the melody like river light and the rhythm section walking softly behind him. Fogerty’s grain—a little oak, a little dust—meets Prine’s melody right where it lives: plain-spoken, humane, stubbornly decent. Where some covers chase the chorus’s nostalgia, Fogerty keeps his eyes on the road ahead; the sorrow is real, but the song is a witness, not a wallow. It’s the same moral backbone you hear in his own writing—think “Bad Moon Rising,” “Run Through the Jungle”—now turned outward in solidarity with a fellow songwriter’s grief.
Placed first on The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again, “Paradise” becomes a mission statement. Fogerty’s return to the Rangers idea isn’t about retro chic; it’s about kinship—standing inside the American songbook and singing like a working musician among peers. The sequencing says as much: from “Paradise” he moves through Delaney & Bonnie and a tenderly re-cut “Garden Party,” all rendered with that lived-in band sound he once made alone in 1973. The charts weren’t the point this time, but they tell a clear story: a Top-25 U.S. bow for a set of covers means the audience recognized something honest in the project.
Meaning, for those who’ve lived a little. If you came up with a transistor by the window and a river not far off, Prine’s lyric is a bruise you carry; Fogerty presses it gently, not to hurt but to show it still feels. He leans on consonants like fence posts, lets the vowels widen into the chorus, and never rushes the release. You can hear the rooms where this would bloom best: a small theater, a county fair at dusk, a kitchen at midnight with the radio low. The performance asks nothing more than your attention, and it rewards you with the oldest gift music gives—recognition.
One last note for discography minds: while the album’s guests and studio credits are rich, “Paradise” remains a model of restraint. No pyrotechnics, no gilded modulations—just a song given the air it needs. That’s why it lingers. In Fogerty’s hands, Prine’s farewell to a lost town feels less like a history lesson and more like a promise to remember what ordinary lives are worth.
Key facts at a glance: Song — “Paradise” (written by John Prine); Artist — John Fogerty; Album — The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again (released Sept. 1, 2009; recorded Oct. 2008, Santa Monica); Track/length — Track 1, ~3:50; Personnel note — Jason Mowery (dobro) on the track; Album charts — US Billboard 200 #24, Australia #83.
And if you play it tonight, let that first dobro phrase settle you into the chair. The Green River runs through the room for a few minutes, and when Fogerty finishes, the silence that follows feels like a prayer answered, or at least heard.