Even though musician John Denver didn’t have the lyrics memorized yet, he walked onto the small stage at the Cellar Door, an intimate music club in the quaint Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on December 30, 1970, and sang a new song he'd finished co-writing the night before. As he made his way through the words, written down on a piece of paper and taped to his microphone stand, he could feel the energy of the crowd rise. By the end of the song, the room was engulfed in a thunderstorm of applause. Denver knew he had something special.
With the first live performance of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at that little club, Denver catapulted his music career into the national spotlight.
Country Music or Country and Western
Though Denver’s work is steeped in country tradition, with many of his tracks paying homage to rural ways of life, appreciating nature, and honoring family, his crossover appeal sometimes worked against him. Folk influences in his music led critics to compare him to Bob Dylan, but Denver never saw himself as the next Dylan. And when he won Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Association award show in 1975, Nashville-based industry professionals were so up in arms that Denver’s brief relationship with the genre came to a temporary halt. Despite “Take Me Home, Country Roads” peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart in 1971, years later Denver still felt like an outsider to country music.
In an interview included on his 1995 DVD “The Wildlife Concert,” he stated: “When I grew up, the music that I listened to, the music that I was raised on was called ‘country and western.’ ... The songs that are most moving to me and the songs that are most uniquely mine ... those are songs that come out [of] the spirit of the American West.”
Not since the days of early singing cowboys like country and western’s Gene Autry did someone embody the spirit of the American cowboy as much as John Denver did. “Rocky Mountain High” and “Wild Montana Skies” connected so deeply with listeners, helping them to rediscover joys residing in the freedom of America’s landscape, that some critics ultimately compared him to Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s most treasured philosophers. When radio stations thought “Rocky Mountain High” was about participating in illicit activities, Denver replied: “This was obviously done by people who ... had never experienced the elation, celebration of life, or the joy in living that one feels when he observes something as wondrous as the Perseid meteor shower on a moonless, cloudless night.”
The Exultation of Nature
Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., his stage name pays tribute to his favorite state of Colorado with its towering mountains and sprawling wilderness. For his tenderhearted “Annie’s Song,” released later as a single and written while on a ski trip, he had to rework the melody when his producer pointed out to him that it closely resembled Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Second Movement. The track’s uplifting string section of “Annie’s Song” makes you feel like you’re onboard a ski lift with Denver, getting an exclusive peek at the symphonies playing in his head as he glides over snow-laden slopes.
Before his tragic passing in a small plane crash in 1997, Denver made his core purpose for performing live very clear: “My purpose in performing is to communicate the joy I experience in living.” Like the Rocky Mountains he loved so much, Denver’s grand, poetic range of music endures. Through his works, may we remember the importance of quiet exaltation underneath a meteor shower. May we remember that despite life’s twists and turns, there’s always some near-heaven country road that can lead us home.
