Take Me Home, Country Roads

Denver wrote this song with his friends Bill and Taffy Danoff, who were married at the time (Taffy later became Taffy Nivert). Denver was in Washington, DC to perform with the Danoffs, and after the show they went back to the couple's home where they played him what they had of this song (John almost didn't make it - he got in a car accident on the way over and was taken to a hospital for a thumb injury). Denver helped them complete the song, and the next night they sang it together on stage. Denver knew he had a hit song on his hands, and brought the Danoffs to New York where they recorded the song together - you can hear Bill and Taffy on background vocals.

The country roads in this song are in West Virginia, but Denver had never even been to West Virginia. Bill and Taffy Danoff started writing the song while driving to Maryland - they'd never been to West Virginia either! Danoff got his inspiration from postcards sent to him by a friend who DID live there, and from listening to the powerful AM station WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia, which he picked up in Massachusetts when he was growing up. Bill Danoff told NPR in 2011: "I just thought the idea that I was hearing something so exotic to me from someplace as far away. West Virginia might as well have been in Europe, for all I knew."

The song represents a state of mind rather than a specific location, even though it is set in West Virginia. "It was the idea of country roads anywhere that inspired the song," Bill Danoff told the Library of Congress. "The thought that originally drove me to write the song, that this experience of enjoying driving down the country road, was a universal one and it proved to be correct... People all over seem to like those 'country roads' that promise to go to the place you belong."