On This Day in 1974, John Denver Went No. 1 With a Tribute Song to His Wife—Written in 10 Minutes on a Ski Lift

“Annie’s Song” scored John Denver his second No. 1 hit on July 27, 1974. Denver, whose track topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, penned the song for his then-wife, Annie Martell.

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“Annie’s Song” was Denver’s only track to have a multi-week run on the chart. He found week-long No. 1 success three other times throughout his career: “Sunshine on My Shoulders” in 1974, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” in 1975, and “I’m Sorry” in 1975.

The lead single off of his eighth studio album, Back Home Again, “Annie’s Song” came after the couple had reconciled following a tumultuous period in their marriage.

At the time, Denver went skiing in Aspen, Colorado. On his chair lift ride up the mountain, Denver wrote the song in just 10 minutes.

How John Denver Wrote “Annie’s Song”

 “It was written after John and I had gone through a pretty intense time together and things were pretty good for us,” Martell once explained. “He left to go skiing and he got on the Ajax chair on Aspen mountain and the song just came to him.”

Denver described the moment similarly in his autobiography, Take Me Home: An Autobiography.

“Suddenly, I’m hypersensitive to how beautiful everything is. All of these things filled up my senses, and when I said this to myself unbidden images came one after the other,” he wrote of being on the ski lift. “All of the pictures merged and I was left with Annie. That song was the embodiment of the love I felt at that time.”

Once the images began to form, Martell said that Denver ” skied down and came home and wrote it down.”

“Initially it was a love song and it was given to me through him,” she said. “Yet for him it became a bit like a prayer.”

Eight years after the song’s success, Denver and Martell divorced. Denver went on to marry Australian actress Cassandra Delaney in 1988. The pair split in 1991. They divorced two years later.

Four years after his second divorce, Denver died when his home-built airplane crashed into California’s Monterey Bay.

Photo by David Warner Ellis/Redferns