The "Big Wheel Keeps On Turning, Proud Mary Keeps On Burning" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  It was mid-May, 50 years ago, school was out and I was listening to the radio in my car on the way home from a hard day of teaching school at good old Manheim Township High School where I had gone to school as a student and also taught Graphic Arts and Photography.  Oh. how the memories seem to flood my mind...and disappear as fast as they entered.  I was listening to my car radio as I headed in the Lititz Pike to my home in the Grandview Heights Section of the township.  Naturally had the radio tuned in to the local radio station who was playing my favorite songs as they always did in the afternoon.  How many of you remember listening to the radio and catching the songs of 1971 such as: "Proud Mary", "It's too late" and "Ain't no sunshine"?  I look back to the years when Rock 'n Roll was the genre of the times.  As you can see by now...my story today is geared to my friends who were born in the mid 1950s to the 1970s and who had a love of Rock 'n Roll in their blood.  The year was 1971 and love, sex and rock 'n roll were the stories behind the memory-making music we listened to 50 years ago.  The greatest songs of 1971 started the new decade with fresh attitudes that made you just have to memorize the lyrics and sing along no matter if you had a good voice or not.  Hey, for me...I was in the car by myself and no one could stop me from singing along no matter if I remembered all the words or not and if I sang bass to a song that was by Tina Turner.  Come on...you heard of Tina Turner didn't you?  It was she and Ike that sang "Proud Mary" on the radio that day in May as I headed home.  But, did you know that it was Creedence Clearwater Revival that had made the song a hit two years earlier.  Then along came Ike who didn't like their version and changed the arrangement starting it "nice and easy" before making it "nice and rough," as Tina would later note.  Tina used the song for years, keeping it in her final tour in 2009.  Perhaps my favorite song of the year was "Take Me Home, Country Roads." sung by John Denver.  My wife Carol and I had the chance to see John in concert at the Hershey Ice Rink in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1971 when he sang all our favorites.  Seems that a married couple, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, performed the song which was first about Maryland.  They opened a concert one time for John and sang the song.  After the show, John added his own rendition to the tune, and the result made him a star with the song going to No. 2 and West Virginia making it their state song.  Being that my wife was a fan of The Beatles, we both enjoyed John Lennon's song "Imagine" which was probably his bestselling and most beloved song from 1971 that he had written.  The song came from poems that his wife Yoko Ono had written for her 1964 book "Grapefruit."  The song has been sung by more than 200 artists since that time.  Another of our favorites was "Brown Sugar" which was by The Rolling Stones.  The song was part of their 11th American LP titled Sticky Fingers.  Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics in 45 minutes.  Another hit from 1971 was Isaac Hayes' "Theme From Shaft."  The hard driving beat was hard to ignore and it gave him a #1 single that year.  He also took the Oscar for Best Original Song, making him the first Black artist to win that prize.  That guy was one, cool dude!  One more of my favorites was a song by The Doors titled "Riders On The Storm" which was recorded with singer Jim Morrison.  The song had its roots in the old cowboy song "Ghost Riders in the Sky" but was modernized by centering on a hitch-hiking killer who murdered six people in the 1950s while traveling between Missouri and California.  The single came out about a month before Morrison died of heart failure, likely due to drugs.  So, you see that the year 1971 had some good songs that will always be remembered...at least by my generation.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.