On The Road Again (Canned Heat Song)
"On the Road Again," a song recorded by the American blues rock group Canned Heat, was released as a single in April 1968, and appeared on their 1968 album Boogie with Canned Heat as well as the 1969 compilation The Canned Heat Cookbook. It reached number eight on the UK Singles Chart and number sixteen on the Billboard Hot 100.
"On the Road Again" was adapted by Alan Wilson from a song of the same name recorded in 1953 by Floyd Jones (July 21, 1917 – December 19, 1989), a Chicago blues musician. Jones' song was itself an adaptation of "Big Road Blues," recorded in 1928 by Delta blues musician Tommy Johnson.
With his knowledge of Eastern music, Wilson used a tambura drone to give the song a hypnotic effect and a psychedelic edge. The song features Wilson as the lead singer and harmonica player. Wilson's harmonica solo has a note that is not playable without an overblow; he re-tuned his harmonica's six hole up a half step. The B-side of the single was entitled "Boogie Music". A black and white live performance is used in place of a video.
The song appears in the films Alice in the Cities (1973), Hideous Kinky (1998), Frequency (2000), Cold Creek Manor (2003), and The Bucket List (2007) and the videogame Need for Speed: The Run (2011).
Read more about On The Road Again (Canned Heat Song): Other Versions
Famous quotes containing the words road and/or heat:
“Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold,
Hight-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they
An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round
May match in wealth—thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)