A Poem, A Prayer & A Promise: The Power of Take Me Home, Country Roads
How a song written about someplace else by someone who had never been there became an anthem for folks everywhere. Especially West Virginians.
Over at Yonder & Home, my writing site where I do writing on food, folks, and faith with no politics, one piece that I keep getting requests for is this one, so re-upping it for our friends & subscribers here that might have missed it the first time. Will be posting other Yonder & Home pieces in the future. Please read & share.
I’m sitting on a wooden pew, having a moment.
I’m trying, and failing, not to blubber all over myself. Sitting in the second pew of the First Methodist Church in Clearwater, Florida, I and most of the rest of the six reserved rows of family members are having a good cry about something that usually fills us with joy. We all knew it was coming, the ending of the service marked only the middle part of this very long day. Foreknowledge did nothing to soften the emotional blow. Tradition long ago held what song would close out the hours’ worth of remembrances, eulogies, and stories that, if you didn’t know any better, would seem too fantastic to be true. Even had tradition not demanded it, there was nothing even close to being a more appropriate coda.
My two cousins are playing it on violins, accompanied by the church’s music director on piano in a lovely arrangement. They manage through it despite their own emotion, specifically doing this for their grandfather whose memorial we’re all attending. A man whose inner child never really left the place we were all thinking on. Florida is a long way from Up Yonder, but those mountains never really leave any of us, and drove a spirit of adventure in my departed uncle. The familiar rise and fall of the melody, the bridge comes and goes, the last chorus and the cutting eyes of my mother warning everyone in this pew there would be none of the traditional shouting since we were in church. Some traditions veto others, it seems.
There are smiles and tears and then rousing, cathartic applause and a standing ovation that goes on for quite a while. My two little cousins finally let their performance faces drop and take in the moment, emotionally exhausted from their father’s earlier eulogy and their own resoluteness to do things right. Their mother comes and helps them walk down to join the family for the procession out.
What a picture. The half-Chinese grandchildren of the oldest son of a family that had been in West Virginia since before there was an America, or a Virginia, much less a West Virginia, has everyone in a Florida church in tears over a song that holds way more meaning than words can convey. Who needs We Are the World?You can keep your power ballads and gawdawful Imagine John Lennon foolishness. We got John Denver and West Virginia.
Take Me Home, Country Roads just does that to us.
West By God Virginia, Song Edition
The official story is goes like this; In order to really make an impression at opening day for the new Mountaineer Field in Morgantown, West Virginia, then-Governor Jay Rockefeller invited John Denver to sing his hit song Take Me Home, Country Roads in front of the WVU faithful.
It was actually more like a semi-official kidnapping.
Denver, who was on tour at the time, had turned down multiple requests to show up. Not because he didn’t want to, but because the logistics of getting from his tour stops to out-of-the-way Morgantown and back again just wasn’t doable. Undaunted, Rockefeller sent the official West Virginia State Police helicopter to fetch the singer, his guitar, and two friends to sing back up. Denver walked from the helicopter to the mic centered within 300-odd WVU marching band members shaped like the outline of the state, sang the song, then went straight back to the helicopter.
What happened in the period between those two helicopter rides has been legend ever since, and a tradition that rivals any the hills of the state have developed in their long and winding history.
“New” Mountaineer field, as it was known on opening day, became the largest city in the state on game day. On this particular fall day in 1980, over 50,000 were packed in. Denver, accompanied by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert (Danoff) who had written Country Roads and performed it for years with the singer, had to shush the crowd to be heard once the PA announcer named him, which proved futile the second he greeted the masses with a “Good afternoon West BY GOD VIRGINIA” which elicited a roar so sustained all official recordings of the moment had to edit down the ovation. Denver took another stab at it, but this time his pre-planned thanking of the governor for bringing him brought boos and jeering to the point the singer had to tell the crowd to “be nice.” After announcing his friends and a brief mention of them writing the song together, he told the crowd “we would like to sing for you, and would like you to sing with us” before getting down to the business at hand.
He needn’t have bothered imploring them to sing along. They were going to do so with or without John Denver there.
The crowds at WVU football games had been singing Country Roads since 1972. The state, routinely ignored by outsiders when it isn’t being exploited by them, doesn’t have much to latch onto. A song having the name “West Virginia” as the centerpiece meant appropriation was immediate and permanent. If you put West Virginia on anything, it becomes ours, one way or another. ‘Dems the rules. So with eight years of practice under their belts, and with the celebratory atmosphere, the mountaineers were ready to show out.
Boy, did they.
Every word was sung by what seemed like every person present. Perhaps carried away in the moment, Denver repeated the last “West Virginia” in the refrain twice, breaking out of his singing voice to yell it, a tradition that started right then and lasts to this day. When he finished and told the crowd thank you, he was again mostly drowned out. By the time Jack Fleming made the utterly superfluous announcement of “John Denver singing Country Roads,” the place had come unglued and Denver just took a moment to look around, soaking it all in. Smiles and tears and then rousing, cathartic applause and a standing ovation that went on for quite a while.
Mountaineer games have featured Country Roads ever since. West Virginians have featured the song in everything from weddings, to funerals, to church services for just as long. That Denver hadn’t been to West Virginia before the song became a hit, and — depending on which version of the story you want to believe — had barely been there since, didn’t matter.
Which is fine, since John Denver didn’t write most of the song anyway.
Massachusetts Just Doesn’t Sound Right When Sung in a DC Apartment
Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert knew they had the makings of a good song, but just couldn’t get it to work.
Danoff had the basic structure down, and knew the story he wanted to tell. A trip to Gaithersburg, Maryland for a family get together from Washington, DC, driving along Clopper Road — which at the time was two lanes and trees — inspired him. The geography, debated from the moment the song debuted until likely the end of time, was a secondary consideration. “We’re pop songwriters, and we were trying to write hit songs. It sounded good, the structure was right, the chorus was right,” Danoff explained to the Washington Post about the process he and then-not-yet-ex-wife/songwriting partner Taffy Nivert was using.
At the time the two were playing at a Washington joint called The Cellar Door under the moniker “Fat City”, opening up for an up-and-coming singer-songwriter named John Denver. After one of their shows, Denver came back to their basement apartment, and upon hearing the rough outline for what would become Country Roads, he “flipped”. Out went Danoff’s plan to sell the song to Johnny Cash. Denver worked out the bridge that had eluded them, and after an entire night of tweaking the song the trio though they had something:
When we first sang the song together the following night, it seemed as though the audience would never stop applauding. Next show same thing. We knew we had a hit. We recorded in New York the following Monday, and “Country Roads” became John’s first record to hit the charts. He started to arrange his bookings so that Fat City could be his opening act — we would join him at the end of his set to perform the songs we had recorded together.
That recording of Country Roads came out on Denver’s fourth studio album Poems, Prayers & Promises and would eventually be his breakthrough record. But it wasn’t an immediate success; Denver begged the record company not to give up on the single after the initial slow response and was proven right. It took a few months, but once County Roads started getting airplay, it took off. The single went gold, then platinum.
The lyrics became iconic, and something of an inside joke. “Almost Heaven” became so entrenched in West Virginia lore it’s on the license plates and state welcome signs. The Blue Ridge Mountains barely scrape by the edges of the state full of hills. The Shenandoah River slithers through the corner of the state just wide enough for Harper’s Ferry to straddle the sung of river and the Potomac it runs into — and be pivotal to American history — but not room for much else. Most of the rest of the imagery was placed in the song for harmonic, more than geographical, sentiments.
In fact, West Virginia almost didn’t make it into the song at all. When he couldn’t get Maryland to fit the metre of the song, he fiddled with Massachusetts before settling on West Virginia. Growing up in Massachusetts, Danoff would often listen to the powerful WWVA radio station out of Wheeling, WV. That the Mountain State must have beautiful country roads similar to the Maryland drive that inspired him was an educated guess.
Good thing he was right; otherwise the most famous song about West Virginia might not have become the 4th official state song in 2014.
That’s not a misprint. Fourth. And it’s a recent event.
Wherever You May Roam, The Song In Your Head Is Home
I’m sitting on a wooden bench and I’m having a moment.
Surrounded by thousands of Germans and international tourists in various stages of inebriation, the roaring den of the beer tent in Munich changes to the full-throated roar of a mostly harmonious song. A very familiar song, though the accents were rounding off the edges off the words, and the traditional German band had more of a polka vibe than the version I knew by heart.
But they shouted the last West Virginia with uber enthusiasm, enough to get approval from any die hard mountaineer, and even with drunken German influences there was no mistaking Country Roads.
Now how did that happen?
All the good things you would expect were available in plenty at the annual “Day of German Unity” party hosted by the embassy in Washington: Heaps of sauerbrauten, vats of good beer, oom-pah music, and for the first time this year, D.C. singer-songwriter Bill Danoff. For decades, Danoff’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — a 1971 hit for John Denver — has been a sing-along favorite at Munich’s Oktoberfest, a nostalgic touchstone bound to bring Germans to their feet whenever it’s played. Why? “I have no idea,” Danoff, 67, told us. “I’ve never been to Germany” — though he’d never been to West Virginia either before he wrote his ode to the Mountain State. Ask German natives why they get misty-eyed over a song about the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge, what cultural resonance they find in it, and you’ll get a quizzical stare: It’s a really good song, don’t you think?
Da, it is, y’all. And the German’s aren’t the only ones who think so. “Since its release almost 50 years ago,” writes Golden Horseshoe winner Nick Brumfield for Expatalachians, “Country Roads has become a global sensation: more than 150 artists have covered the song in at least 19 languages. And while Mountaineers might like to think they have pride of place in loving the song, a review of the passionate response it has received around the world shows they shouldn’t take that place for granted.”
I’m sorry, you don’t know what the Golden Horseshoe is? Well, then…
If you grow up in West Virginia, like all 8th graders you are required to take a semester of West Virginia history in school. As part of an effort to promote knowledge of the state in students, another tradition stepped in, an historic event dusted off and repurposed. Legend has it in 1716, the governor of the Virginia Colony, Alexander Spotswood, enticed 50 men to travel over the western mountains and explore the land that is now West Virginia. To each of them he swore them to “Sic jurat transcendere monte,” or in the vernacular “Thus he swears to cross the mountains.”
Fast forward to the 1930s, and with the statewide initiative to have West Virginia history incorporated in schools the presenting of a Golden Horseshoe to 8th graders who tested in the top two of their counties in the subject become “knights and ladies of the Golden Horseshoe.” There’s a whole ceremony and everything. It’s kind of a big deal. Nick Brumfield was a 2007 recipient. Unlike the controversial 1993 travesty of justice in which I was cheated out of my rightful place. No, I don’t want to talk about it.
Anywho…Country Roads…
West Virginia History class teaches you the mundane but serviceable The West Virginia Hills, the dreadful This is My West Virginia, and the utterly gawdawful West Virginia, My Home Sweet Home had the “Official State Song” issue pretty much surrounded. Bills came and went in the legislature to correct this glaring problem, but nothing really happened. Another attempt was made in 2013, passed the state senate, but then sat and languished like all the others.
Then something funny happened.
It was another Denver, no relation to John, who got the ball rolling on the 2013 legislation. Dreama Denver, widow of “Gilligan’s Island” actor Bob Denver, was playing the song on her radio show and was surprised to learn Country Roads wasn’t the state song when asked by a caller. She started pushing legislators, and the senate bill was duly passed. Public sentiment started to grow. Then-governor Earl Ray Tomblin, upon signing the resolution finally making Denver’s hit officially West Virginia’s, recounted being in Taiwan on a trade mission years before, and walking into the hotel nightclub where they immediately played Country Roads. “I’m very proud that ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ finds a new home among our beloved official state songs,” Tomblin said at the ceremony. The song West Virginians had made “theirs” from the moment it came out was finally canonized as the patron music of mountaineers everywhere.
At least everyone knows the words to this one.
Home by Now, No Matter What, One Way or Another
It works out perfectly every time.
As soon as you crest the hill and can see the solid green wall of mountains and the southern portal of the East River Mountain Tunnel coming fast, hit play. By the time you go through the last few curves of northbound I-77 and the 5,412-foot tunnel, John Denver should just be finishing up his long, warbling “Driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay” as an explosion of daylight marks the end of Virginia. The sign welcomes you to Almost Heaven, just as you get to “take me home” at the very moment you are.
The bridge John Denver contributed to Country Roads all those years ago in a DC basement has all sorts of meaning for the scattered diaspora of hillbillies when they reach their native land again. While West Virginians hang their hat on the mountain mama parts, the rest of the world can, and has, grasped onto the wider meanings of the song: Home, and longing, and memories.
As long as humans have had music, there has been a mystical meeting between sound and emotion. A simple yet perfectly crafted melody, combined with words that in and of themselves are fairly routine but, when arranged just so, become an injection of longing, and hoping, and wishing. It’s powerful stuff, hummable as it may be.
So powerful are these longings for home it could kill you. About the time Governor Spotswood was sending the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe over yonder, a Swiss physician was noticing mercenary soldiers were having a rough time being away from home, and coined a term which has since changed in meaning.
Although we now associate nostalgia with fond memory, the word was coined to refer to an unwanted medical condition. The -algia in nostalgia means “pain”; a product of New Latin, it can be found in more clinical-sounding words such as glossalgia (pain in the tongue), cranialgia (a fancy word for headache), and proctalgia (a literal pain in the behind). Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) was a Swiss physician who named the condition, which he identified as a mania tied to homesickness in Swiss mercenary soldiers. The nost- in nostalgia means “homecoming,” and such sentimental yearning for home during field operations was viewed as a disorder of the brain, with symptoms ranging from melancholy and malnutrition to brain fever and hallucinations.
West Virginia knows about pain, both metaphorical for songs, legends, and stories and the very real pain of economic struggles, cultural stereotypes, and all sorts of hard times. These days, an opioid crisis cutting down an entire generation of West Virginians in a state already demographically bleeding to death is a new flaming log on the generations-old burning pyre of Mountain State problems. Generations of too few jobs, to many mouths too feed, and the debate every West Virginians since 1863 has — at least fleetingly — had to grapple with: Should you cross those mountains or stick it out at home? Either way it’s still home, even if only in your mind. Or in your heart. Or in a song.
If you do cross those mountains, like I did, you find the rest of the world is an amazing place, but wherever you roam it isn’t quite like that one. You find from Germany to Taiwan the idea of longing for home transcends languages, and folks everywhere have the same sentiment you might about it, and can sing along since the melody is perfect in its simplicity and the lyrics are universal in meaning. Whether at a WVU ballgame or a Munich biergarten or the fire Up Yonder, a happy song can — in the twitch of a heart string — turn into something more. There are smiles and tears and then rousing, cathartic applause and a standing ovation that goes on for quite a while, because it stirs us up so much.
Which is why, in our family, the perfect ending to a funeral service is the playing of Country Roads. After leaving the funeral service in Florida, the Marine detail at the graveside folded the flag and another song steeped in tradition plays. Taps comes from the old bugle call to extinguish lights, the last official duty call of the day. Which makes it appropriate for military funerals. The lights are out. The duty is done.
Same goes for Country Roads for those of us to whom it means so much more than just a tune on the radio. We are all going home someday, one way or another, and it’s best to just know this and make sure everyone in the pews sings along for you when it’s your turn at the front of the church. It’s a good tradition. It’s a great song. It’s an amazing life.
Nothing to be upset about. After all, should have been home yesterday.
Originally published at Yonder & Home by Andrew Donaldson May 28th, 2020