Canned Heat - Going Up the Country (Live, Woodstock 1969)

I'm goin' up the country fair, did you want to go?
I'm goin' up the country fair, did you want to go?
I'm goin' to some place, where I've never been before

I'm goin', I'm goin' where the water tastes like wine
Well, I'm goin' where the water tastes like wine
You can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time

I'm gonna leave the city, got to get away
I'm gonna leave the city, got to get away
All this fussing and fighting man, you know I sure can't stay

So baby pack your leavin' trunk
You know I've got to leave today
Just exactly where we're goin' I cannot say, but
We might even leave the U.S.A.
There's a brand new game, and I don't want to play

No use in you runnin', or screamin' and cryin'
'Cause you've got a home as long as I've got mine

Gotta get going, gotta get going
Gotta get going, gotta get going
Gotta get going, well, I'm going, well, I'm going, come on

Gotta get going, I can't stay here long, now
'Cause I'm tired of the way I've been dogged around
Well, I've found a road - I'll find me a brand new...


Canned Heat is an American blues rock band that was formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The group has been noted for its efforts to promote interest in blues music and its original artists. It was launched by two blues enthusiasts, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who took the name from Tommy Johnson's 1928 "Canned Heat Blues", a song about an alcoholic who had desperately turned to drinking Sterno, generically called "canned heat". After appearances at the Monterey and Woodstock festivals at the end of the 1960s, the band acquired worldwide fame with a lineup of Hite (vocals), Wilson (guitar, harmonica and vocals), Henry Vestine and later Harvey Mandel (lead guitar), Larry Taylor (bass), and Adolfo de la Parra (drums).

The music and attitude of Canned Heat attracted a large following and established the band as one of the popular acts of the hippie era. Canned Heat appeared at most major musical events at the end of the 1960s, performing blues standards along with their own material and occasionally indulging in lengthy "psychedelic" solos. Three of their songs—"Going Up the Country", "On the Road Again", and "Let's Work Together"—became international hits.

Since the early 1970s, following the early death of Wilson, numerous personnel changes have occurred. For much of the 1990s and 2000s and following Taylor's death in 2019, de la Parra has been the only member from the band's 1960s lineup. Walter Trout and Junior Watson are among the guitarists who played in later editions of the band.


"Going Up the Country" (also Goin' Up the Country) is a song adapted and recorded by American blues rock band Canned Heat. Called a "rural hippie anthem", it became one of the band's biggest hits and best-known songs. As with their previous single, "On the Road Again", the song was adapted from a 1920s blues song and sung by Alan Wilson.

Canned Heat, who were early blues enthusiasts, based "Going Up the Country" on "Bull Doze Blues", recorded in 1928 by Texas bluesman Henry Thomas. Thomas was from the songster tradition and had a unique sound, sometimes accompanying himself on quills, an early Afro-American wind instrument similar to panpipes. He recorded "Bull Doze Blues" in Chicago on June 13, 1928, for Vocalion Records.

For "Going Up the Country", Canned Heat's Wilson used Thomas' melody on the quills and his basic rhythm, but arranged it for a rock setting and rewrote the lyrics. In addition to the bass and drum rhythm section, Henry Vestine supplied a "light electric rhythm guitar" and multi-instrumentalist Jim Horn reproduced Thomas' quill parts on the flute.

Although linked to the counterculture of the 1960s' back-to-the-land movement, Wilson's lyrics are ambiguous, leading some to suggest they were about evading the draft during the Vietnam War by moving to Canada.


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