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John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ has become an anthem for the state and a featured part of Mountaineer sports.
MORGANTOWN — We sometimes overlook the place music holds in creating the atmosphere in sports arenas across America and the emotional attachment fans and the athletes hold with songs as they are played.
Be it a pregame National Anthem or a seventh-inning stretch version of “God Bless America”, be it walk up music for a batter or a basketball prep band or football marching band, it is as much a part of the theater that is sports as are touchdowns, three-point shots or home runs.
And, as West Virginia’s baseball team readies itself to open its Super Regional series at North Carolina, it seems only right that we should match up two songs by two superstar performers that represent the two states and the hold they have on their residents.
In West Virginia, of course, John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” has become an anthem for the state and a featured part of Mountaineer sports.
And, in North Carolina, “Carolina in My Mind” by James Taylor has been unofficially adopted not only by the state but the athletic department at the school.
At WVU, to see the baseball team — or football, basketball, soccer etc. — line up after a victory and join in singing “Country Roads” with the fans following a victory is worth the price of admission.
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads
That, of course, is the chorus and what it shouts out is that wherever a West Virginian is, the state is always calling him home.
And so it is with the song Taylor wrote and sang about his state, North Carolina:
In my mind, I’m gone to Carolina
Can’t you see the sunshine?
Now can’t you just feel the moonshine?
And ain’t it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?
Yes, I’m gone to Carolina in my mind
The thought is exactly the same, that being no matter where you are, home is calling to you.
In many ways the two states are similar. Green and mountaineers, hard working people, common people who look not at what they don’t have but instead appreciate what they have.
Alike?
Did you notice in the chorus reference to moonshine?
Here’s the second verse of “Country Roads”.
All my memories gather ’round her
Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye
Yeah, we get it.
“Country Roads” was written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and Denver and released on April 12, 1971, climbing to No. 2 on the charts.
Taylor wrote the song in 1968 and it was released as a single in 1969. While it had high critical praise, it was met with little commercial success. But it wasn’t overlooked as it became one of the most covered songs of all time.
Oddly, and quite interestingly, Taylor did a cover of Denver’s “Country Roads.”
Just as oddly, the inspiration for “Country Roads” did not come in West Virginia. Instead, Danoff and his wife Nivert were driving down Clopper Road in Montgomery County, Maryland, when the thought of country roads hit Danoff.
It wasn’t West Virginia or Maryland. “It didn’t have anything to do with Maryland or any place,” Danoff told NBC in 2021.
But, to steal a line from Taylor, Danoff kind of had West Virginia in his mind as he wrote the song.
Take the line “…the radio reminds me of my home far away.”
That Danoff, a New Englander, said was an allusion to his youth when he would listen on the radio in his Springfield, Mass., to “Saturday Night Jamboree”, which was broadcast from Wheeling on WWVA.
Danoff also said that friend and West Virginia actor Chris Sarandon and members of the commune who attended his performances influenced him.
“They brought their dogs and were a very colorful group of folks, but that is how West Virginia began creeping into the song,” Danoff told WVU Sports in 2014.
In truth, the emotion poured into the song by Danoff was sort of a verification of the saying “Home is where your heart is,” a saying that has its roots in the Roman Empire and that may well have been introduced in America in the Fayetteville Weekly Observer.
And, yes, that’s Fayetteville, North Carolina.
As it was with Danoff, Taylor was not in West Virginia when he came up with the song. In fact, he was across the Atlantic in London recording for the Beatles’ Apple label and it came after he did some reminiscing about his days growing up in North Carolina.