On This Day in 1971, John Denver Released This Official State Anthem of West Virginia (A Place He’d Never Been)

Apparently, you can perform an entire hit song about a specific place without ever setting foot there. (Just ask Waylon Jennings.) On this day (April 12) in 1971, beloved country-folk singer John Denver released the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” from his album Poems, Prayers and Promises. The song name-checks West Virginia and its famed Blue Ridge Mountains, leading the state to adopt it as an official song in 2014. In fact, none of the song’s writers had ever visited the Mountain State.

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This John Denver Hit Was Actually Inspired By a Different State

John Denver wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with Bill Danoff (of “Afternoon Delight” fame) and his then-wife, singer-songwriter Taffy Nivert.

None of them were West Virginia natives. Denver grew up mostly in New Mexico and Arizona, while Danoff hailed from Springfield, Massachusetts. Nivert was born and raised in Washington, D.C.

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Inspiration for the song’s title struck the married couple during a 1970 trip along Clopper Road to Nivert’s family reunion in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

“I just started thinking, country roads, I started thinking of me growing up in western new England and going on all these small roads,” Danoff, now 79, said in 2020. “It didn’t have anything to do with Maryland or anyplace.”

Turns out, the song’s West Virginia setting had much more to do with logistics than nostalgia.

“I’m a songwriter. I was looking for words,” Danoff said. “The words that I loved in that song were Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River. They’re songwriter words, so that got me to West Virginia.”

[RELATED: John Denver’s First No. 1 Hit Came From One Woman’s Heartbreaking Tragedy]

It Was Also Originally Meant For This Country Star

Initially, the pair—performing together as Fat City at the time—hoped to sell the song to Johnny Cash. That changed when they opened for John Denver at a Washington, D.C.-area club in December 1970.

Nivert and Danoff decided to show him the unfinished song—and despite breaking his thumb in a car crash, Denver left the emergency room and headed straight for a planned songwriting session at the couple’s Georgetown apartment. The trio stayed up all night perfecting the song.

“John’s incredible energy was what made it happen,” Danoff said of the singer, who died in 1997. “Left to my own devices, I would have had another beer and played another song.”

Days later, they were in the studio recording. Peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100 and No. 3 on the adult contemporary chart, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” became John Denver’s signature song.

Featured image by Michael Putland/Getty Images