Canned Heat, “Going Up The Country”

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Bonnaroo starts in a few days, with dozens of bands and artists taking its stages. Lollapalooza, Summerfest, and many more huge music festivals occur around the world these days. But nothing will ever be quite like the one that started it all in August 1969: Woodstock. And there will never be another artist quite like Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson, who wrote and sang the band’s single “Going Up The Country” and performed it on the second day of that legendary, record-shattering event.

A song about getting away from the rat race of the city and heading for a rural area, “Going Up The Country” had been a Canned Heat hit before Woodstock. But it became Woodstock’s unofficial anthem, since getting out of town and back to nature was what the festival on Max Yasgur’s New York farm represented to so many. The song had been a track on Canned Heat’s Living the Blues album the year before, and had reached number 11 on the Billboard singles chart. Being performed at Woodstock, and its inclusion on the festival’s triple-LP soundtrack recording, helped prolong the song’s life and the life of the band as well. The studio version of the song was played over a video montage in the Woodstock movie, but the band’s live performance wasn’t included in the original film.

“Going Up the Country” is basically a 12-bar blues that was undeniably inspired by the song “Bull-Doze Blues” by 1920s songster Henry Thomas. Alan Wilson, a devotee of the music from that era, was no doubt familiar with Thomas’ song. The lyrics of “Bull-Doze Blues,” repetitious lines about Thomas leaving his woman and then changing his mind, have nothing in common with Wilson’s lyrics, lines like I’m going where the water tastes like wine/ We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time. But the flute introduction by Jim Horn (who has since played with everyone from U2 to Garth Brooks) is a nearly note-for-note re-creation of Thomas’ 1927 intro, which Thomas played on the “quills,” or a type of cane reed flute. What really caught the ear of 1968 radio listeners, though, was Wilson’s voice, a falsetto/high tenor influenced by bluesman Skip James that was instantly recognizable. Wilson was also an accomplished blues guitar and harmonica player who was actually enlisted to teach Son House to play his own songs after House had forgotten them.

Given even the royalty rates of that era, Wilson should have done well financially with sole authorship of a song that was on a successful album, was a hit single, and was part of both the Woodstock album and movie. Sadly, he wasn’t around long enough to collect much of it. The 27-year-old Wilson became a member of the “27 Club” when he died from an overdose (perhaps intentional) in 1970, just two weeks before another Woodstock performer, Jimi Hendrix, joined that club as well.

Read the lyrics. 

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