Not that song. It always makes me cry.
Worse than B-17 even.
Don’t you know that a whisper of the heart doesn’t echo register? Nobody can hear see it and nobody knows why.
Thank God I’m a Country Boy
Yeah, but I meant almost no one in Germany.
Grandma’s Feather Bed is my favorite John Denver song. It’s also easy to sing along, which I think is the main attraction of Country Road. An easy, singable chorus is what makes a song infectious.
Like Sweet Caroline.
I’d imagine folk who couldn’t name another John Denver song besides “Country Roads” would still instantly recognize many of those mentioned.
Like “Rocky Mountain High”!
Nice!
That song instantly makes me think of the joyful innocence of childhood. It makes me imagine a bunch of cousins…little kids, like 5 or 6 years old…having the time of their life at Grandma’s, squealing and laughing, with the occasional “You kids be quiet and go to sleep!” from the grown-ups.
“Didn’t get much sleep but we had a lot of fun in…Grandma’s feather bed!”
I’ve hung around some karaoke and actually can’t rememeber hearing CR before. My Way and Sweet Caroline, yes. Turn around, Brighteyes. Tin Roof: Rusted.
And others best know John Denver as backup vocals to the Muppets on their 1979 Christmas album.
Only once, in the 1960s, for thirty minutes…
(It ended with a shot by a 1920’s style “Death ray”, it was the will of Og)
I know that song because my mother used to listen to the radio station that played it. I must have heard it a thousand times growing up.
It was the same station that played a bunch of Helen Reddy, Dionne Warwick, The Carpenters and Kenny Rodgers. Damn them all.
I sure as heckfire thought that was going to be Rick Astley.
I always wondered about the lines:
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowin’ like a breeze
Life is younger than the mountains? The Blue Ridge Mountains are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, this is true, estimated to be as much as 1.1 billion years old.
But life is estimated to have begun around 3.8 billion years ago, give or take. C’mon, John, that’s just lazy paleogeology!
The composition of “Country Roads” has little to do with West Virginia. It was written by three writers who were born in Massachusetts, Washington D.C., and New Mexico. One of them spent most of his adult life in Colorado (and wrote the state song for that state). It was inspired by thoughts of driving on a road in Maryland. The writers met in a music club in Washington, D.C. The locations mentioned in the song are more in Virginia than in West Virginia. The song was recorded in New York City.
Well since we’re being petty, there have been at least 3 mass extinctions in the last 100 million years. Most notably the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, which was the single most massive extinction known, 66 Ma.
Zachary, who Denver name dropped (“Merry Christmas, little Zachary”) in “A Baby Just Like You”.
Readers of this thread may also be interested in this one:
The shenandoah river is in VA, not WV
Same with the Blue Ridge Mountains…
FTR, I like the song, but it is a bit inaccurate.
Petty? Is is petty to ask a songwriter to simply get their paleogeologic facts straight in respect to knowledge of the Archean Eon and beyond? I think not!
Now, if the song had said:
Life post-dating the Cretaceous-Paleogene event is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains…
…that’d be better. Of course, trees first emerged 400 million years ago, and it does change the meter a bit.
I like John’s song well enough but I prefer James Taylor’s similarly-named *Country Road", especially Al Kooper’s cover.
Both go through West Virginia, in the far eastern part around Harper’s Ferry, near Maryland. But yeah, the song is more western Virginia than West Virginia.
Shouldn’t that be “deciduous growths”?