John cougar biography

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

For the Record…

Selected discography

Sources

John “Cougar” Mellencamp is rock music’s poet of the American heartland, a strident artist whose original songs mirror the rebellion and hopelessness of a generation of blue-collar youths.

John mellencamp age

Himself a lifelong inhabitant of a small town—Seymour, Indiana, population 15, 000—Mellencamp writes and sings about both the joys and frustrations of small-town life; stylistically, his music harks back to the rough-and-tumble acoustic rock of the 1960s.

As Jim Miller notes in Newsweek, by “hymning the virtues of the rural Midwest,” Mellencamp “has brought to life a moral universe previously unsung in the rock tradition. And in an era when almost every other rock act seems like a state-of-the-art commercial ploy or a cartoon for a new video, Mellencamp has pulled off an almost impossible feat: he has taken some of the most el