7 Classic Rock Songs About Louisiana

Even though John Fogerty, who wrote the song, was raised in Berkely, California, and had most likely never been to a bayou before, this 1969 hit became a CCR staple.

The narrator of the story recalls his youth living in the backwoods of Louisiana on the bayou, just as the song title says.

This is one that reaches outside of New Orleans as Petty proclaims,

"Louisiana rain now is falling just like tears.
Running down my face washing out the years.
Louisiana rain is soaking through my shoes.
I may never be the same when I reach Baton Rouge."

Louisiana Rain was the last song on their breakthrough album Damn the Torpedoes. While this song wasn't a single, the album boasted the likes of "Don't Do Me Like That," "Refugee" and "Here Comes My Girl."

As the story goes, when in New Orleans on concert tours, members of the group would stay at the Royal Orleans Hotel, and the song is reportedly based on an incident that occurred there.^[2]The story goes that once, when staying at the hotel in the early 1970s, John Paul Jones brought a woman from the bar up to his room, unaware she was actually a transvestite. Both smoked marijuana and fell asleep, the woman with a lit joint in her hand, which caught fire and burned the room down (though everyone escaped). The lyrics include lines such as "Be careful how you choose it" and "Poor whiskers set the room alight" to reference the event.

In this solo Jon Bon Jovi song, the narrator recalls his trip to New Orleans and the meetup with a mysterious Cajun woman. Their dancing in the streets of New Orleans is mentioned in the song, and it's led to believe that she was Marie Laveau.

Off of their 1991 album Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik, this song shows the debaucherous side of New Orleans. A fair warning...the song is dirty. 

I'd assume that the narrator of this song is at Mardi Gras, or maybe it was just a crazy weekend night in New Orleans that the band had.

While most people associate this song with Ike and Tina Turner, this is actually a CCR original. The song tells the story of a guy that takes a trip on a riverboat down to New Orleans while mentioning the odd jobs he held on his journey.

For someone not from here, John Fogerty sure wrote a lot about Louisiana.

This song tells the tale of a man whose mother was a seamstress and father was an alcoholic gambler. He follows too closely in his father's footsteps as he seemingly lives in misery in New Orleans' house of the rising sun.

While The Animals recorded the most famous version of this song, the original is a traditional folk song sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues."