Whose Home Is Country?: “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver with Fat City

In his absorbing history of recorded popular music in the USA, Love For Sale, David Hadju recalls interviewing three of the renegade country supergroup The Highwaymen in the early nineties. Kris Kristofferson was absent, but Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were all there. He asked the performers who their biggest early influence was, expecting pious responses like Jimmie Rodgers or The Carter Family. But all were of one accord – the performer who made them want to become country musicians was Gene Autry, whose movies they watched every Saturday morning at the cinema when they were kids. Jennings pointed out that fully half of any audience for a Gene Autry movie went out and bought a guitar the next day, or at any rate asked their parents to buy or lend them one. Hadju was slightly taken aback by this, but Jennings pointed out, rather forcibly, that, okay, Jimmie Rodgers may have been a genius but nobody knew or recognised that when he was alive – it was Autry wot dunnit.

Similarly, I wonder how many young people in the early seventies were moved to take up country music because of John Denver. If you look for his music in your local HMV store you’ll find it filed in the Easy Listening section rather than Country; that may be an indication of his extraordinary crossover appeal in Britain (in the seventies he was forever guesting on Val Doonican’s TV show as well as hosting TV specials of his own) but his transatlantic popularity may signify that he was a markedly bigger influence on generations of country musicians to come than, say, Gram Parsons – I’m not sure that GP was ever a genius, as such (he was musically very shrewd and swift and good at networking but in so many other ways he was a fool), but few people outside of a small circle of rock musicians and other initiates acknowledged his art until he was gone.

This is not to suggest that Poems, Prayers & Promises, the John Denver album on which “Take Me Home, Country Roads” appears, is a greater record than, say, Grievous Angel – but its initial impact was far more dramatic. “Country Roads” was written by a (then-) married couple who at the time had no experience or knowledge of West Virginia. Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert were from Springfield, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC, respectively, and were on their way to a family reunion (Nivert’s family) in Maryland when they started making up a song about the little country roads that they passed on the way. Danoff even considered using Massachusetts rather than West Virginia in the song’s chorus (so it is interesting that Denver’s record was kept off the top by The Bee Gees, although so low was their stock in 1971 Britain that “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” was not even considered for single release here).

Originally Danoff and Nivert wrote “Country Roads” with a view to Johnny Cash singing it. But they also worked as a duo called Fat City, and found themselves supporting John Denver during a residency at the Cellar Door club in Washington, DC, over Christmas 1970. One night all three headed for the couple’s home – on the way, Denver broke his left thumb in a car accident which necessitated his having to go to hospital for a splint to be fitted. Thereafter, the couple told him about this song that they had been working on for the last month or so. They played it to Denver, who loved it immediately and said that he wanted the song for his next album, and so the three of them stayed up all night, working on the song together and making minor changes on the way. They first performed the song as an encore at Denver’s last night at the Cellar Club, with all three reading the words from a folded piece of paper – and the five-minute standing ovation that they received was the longest in the club’s history.

The song was recorded, with Denver singing lead vocals and Fat City backing him up, in New York in January 1971, and appeared as a single a couple of months later. Its initial commercial progress was slow and RCA were ready to give up on the single more than once, but Denver urged them to persevere with it and was right to do so – by summer, it had sold a million and gone gold.

“Country Roads” may be Denver’s most famous, and best, record; it stands as a genuine fork in the aesthetic road, perhaps a latecomer to the late sixties back-to-the-roots movement, but its simple, heartfelt charm touched the nerves and hearts of a lot of people. Although Denver himself was not familiar with West Virginia at the time – he was from Roswell, New Mexico, while the Shenandoah River and Blue Ridge Mountains have only peripheral geographical associations with West Virginia – the tune eventually became an official state song, because in many cases the gesture outweighs the actuality. In the summer of 1971, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” stood for another way out. As for the two members of Fat City, they went on to have a number one in their own right – indeed it was the Bicentennial number one, since they were, by 1976, one half of the Starland Vocal Band.

Date Record Made Number Two: 28 August 1971

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1

Record At Number One: “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” by The Bee Gees

UK Chart Position: None (Olivia Newton-John had a Top 20 hit with her version in 1973)

Other Information: The all-star “Forever Country” single, released in September 2016 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Country Music Association Awards, blends the song with Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”