(Credits: Far Out / Cal Montney / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library)
Sun 8 March 2026 4:00, UK
During the city of Chicago’s foundational years in the late 1800s, it was home to one of the largest Irish populations anywhere outside of Ireland, and as such, the holiday of St Patrick’s Day has always been taken quite seriously: big parades, concerts, ill-advised pub circuits, and beginning in the 1960s, the annual tradition of dyeing the Chicago River green.
St Paddy’s in Chicago has become such a tourist attraction, in fact, that it has an official soft drink sponsor, Green River, an old-timey lime soda now produced up the road in Milwaukee, and just about every Chicagoan has had at least one bottle of it at some point in their lives. When the brand had wider distribution in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of folks all over the country enjoyed a swig, as well, and one person who developed a particular fandom for the drink in his youth was a kid in El Cerrito, California, named John Fogerty.
“Right up the street from the house I lived in was a pharmacy: a drugstore with a soda fountain,” Fogerty recalled in a 2021 social media post, “And one of the drinks they would make for you was a ‘Green River’. I stared at the label on that bottle of syrup when I was about eight years old, and I said, ‘I’m going to save that. That’s important’. And for some reason, it stuck in my head, and eventually all this stuff became a song.”
Released in 1969 as the title track to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s second album, ‘Green River’ was another big chart hit for Fogerty’s fast-rising band, reaching number two on the Billboard. The song followed in the same spirit as CCR’s earlier hits ‘Born on the Bayou’ and ‘Proud Mary’, with Fogerty taking memories from his California childhood and transporting them geographically to the place he wished he was from: Louisiana.
“Love to kick my feet way down the shallow water / Shoo fly, dragon fly, get back to mother / Pick up a flat rock, skip it across Green River,” he sang.
The song provided a nice bit of unpaid advertising for bottlers of Green River soda, but the strange thing was, this wasn’t the first time this specific soft drink had inspired a hit song.
Way back in 1920, long before Chicago started dyeing its river green, Green River soda-pop already existed, originally named for the colour of the lime-flavoured drink as it poured out of a tap. At the time, Chicago’s Schoenhofen Brewery had started producing Green River soda in order to keep their business from going under due to the new alcohol prohibition laws of the period. The drink developed a following, and soon enough, the popular singer Eddie Cantor started performing a new song in his minstrel show called ‘Green River’, which was basically a direct ode to the soda. It became one of the hot-selling pieces of sheet music in 1920.
“Since the country’s turned prohibition / I’ve been in a bad condition / Ev’ry soft drink that I try / Just makes we want to cry / Take it back from whence it came / all your drinks are much the same / I tried one here today and believe me when I say / For a drink that’s fine without a kick / Oh! Green River! / It’s the only drink that does the trick!”
Cantor’s tune helped Green River emerge as one of the most popular soft drinks in America for a brief period, but despite pre-dating other lemon-lime soft drinks like 7-Up, Sprite, and Mountain Dew, it soon ended up more on the periphery of the soda market, best known these days for its spike in sales every March in Chicago, and for the CCR song that it once inspired.