Take Me Home, Country Roads

By John Denver

🎵 Sing along with the full lyrics at LyricFind

“Take Me Home, Country Roads” — the song that made West Virginia “almost heaven” — was written by three people who had never set foot in West Virginia. Songwriters Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, a husband-and-wife duo who performed as Fat City, started it while driving Clopper Road in Maryland on the way to Nivert’s family reunion. Danoff, a Massachusetts kid, drew his mountain-state imagery from postcards a friend sent him and from the “hillbilly music” he’d picked up as a boy on WWVA radio out of Wheeling, West Virginia — a place so far away it might as well have been Europe to him. He even briefly considered making the song “Massachusetts” (the syllables fit!), but “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Shenandoah River” were simply better songwriter words, and they pointed him to West Virginia.

The pair originally hoped to pitch the song to Johnny Cash. Instead, in December 1970, they opened for a still-unknown John Denver at a Washington, D.C. club, played him the unfinished song at their apartment afterward, and ended up staying up all night with him finishing it. Denver released it in April 1971, and after a slow start, it caught fire that summer, soared into Billboard’s Top 5, went Gold, and turned John Denver into a star overnight. The afterlife is even better: in 2014, West Virginia officially adopted it as a state anthem — a love song to a place its writers had only imagined. And Danoff wasn’t done with lightning: he later co-founded the Starland Vocal Band of “Afternoon Delight” fame. But nothing ever topped the country roads that never actually led to West Virginia.