The Song, the state, the story 

June/July 2013

BY MARY WADE BURNSIDE
CORRIDOR MAGAZINE

After the last touchdown has been scored at Mountaineer Field or the final basketball has sailed through the net at the West Virginia University Coliseum, familiar chords fill the atmosphere and fans join together in song.
“Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.”
Voices ring out and sometimes arms are linked and bodies sway back and forth to the beat of the music as laid back as the state the song honors.
“Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze.”
The sight has been witnessed at even bigger, more famous venues, such as Madison Square Garden in New York City after the WVU men’s basketball victory in the Big East tournament.
Suddenly, in that moment, the Big Apple went small town.
“Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong, West Virginia, Mountain momma, take me home, country roads.”
The song was born right around Christmas 1970, written miles away from the Mountain State in Washington, D.C., not only by John Denver, the singer/songwriter who made it famous, but also by his friends Bill and Taffy Danoff.
Ten years later, the trio would be helicoptered next to the new Mountaineer Field for a dedication and first game with a new football coach, Don Nehlen, on Sept. 6, 1980, in front of a crowd of 50,000 enthusiastic fans.
In another two decades, the song would become a mainstay tradition after a home win, as illustrated this past football season following the high-scoring game against Baylor, the team’s first Big 12 Conference match; and at Geno Smith’s last home game against Kansas that drew the quarterback into the stands to join forces with fans and sing.
“I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me. The radio reminds me of my home far away. And driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.”
And an arrangement of the song has been played at every home pregame show, since 1972, by the Pride of West Virginia marching band while promenading into the unique twisting shape of the two-panhandle state, often to the wild cheers of those in the stands.
“Take me home, country roads.”

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More than 40 years after the song emerged as a No. 2 hit on the Billboard charts and went on to capture the imagination of people all over the world, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” has become West Virginia’s unofficial state song.
Another Denver-penned tune, “Rocky Mountain High,” about a state where he actually lived — Colorado — was adopted as the Centennial State’s second state song in 2007.
In West Virginia, nothing has been made official yet, but “Country Roads” is much more popular and better known than the authorized song, “The West Virginia Hills.”
“What we have are some great anecdotal stories from people who have traveled to different areas of the world,” said Betty Carver, commissioner of the West Virginia Division of Tourism, which used the song as the department’s telephone hold music for six years.
“They’ll tell you that they walked into this place in Japan and folks were doing karaoke and someone was singing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,'” she said. “Everyone knows that song and loves it.”
Over the years, the song has become associated with WVU, in part because of the Pride of West Virginia marching band’s rendition of it, arranged by James Miltenberger, a professor of music; and, more recently, the tradition of singing “Country Roads” after a home win, started by former football coach Rich Rodriguez when he took over the team in 2001.
Danny Watts, owner of the Wonder Bar restaurant in Bridgeport, was at Madison Square Garden in 2010 when the WVU basketball team won the Big East tournament.
“To be in Madison Square Garden and virtually every person in that place is singing the song, it was one of the most amazing experiences from a WVU sports event that I’d ever seen,” Watts said.
Then there is Kim Craig, a 1977 WVU graduate and a Clarksburg native who, along with his wife, Debbie, has missed only two football games — home or away — in 10 years.
“‘Country Roads’ has become our family tradition,” said Craig, who lives at Cheat Lake. “We play it at weddings. Any time the family is together, ‘Country Roads’ is going to be played.”
These days, Craig has grandchildren who insist on staying until the end of a football game because of the ritual.
“We never leave until we sing ‘Country Roads,'” he said. “People ask, ‘Why do you like this song?’ And I say, ‘Before John Denver chose to write this song, I lived on country roads. I walked on country roads and I’ve driven on country roads. He just found a way to reflect on life in West Virginia.”

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Although Denver co-wrote the song, Bill Danoff actually had the original idea that eventually became “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Ten years before Danoff flew to Mountaineer Field with Denver, he actually was driving down a two-lane road in Maryland, surrounded by silos and farms and cows in a pasture filled with black-eyed Susans, to attend a family reunion with his then-girlfriend, Taffy Nivert.
The late-summer scene evoked memories of his childhood in Springfield, Mass., near the Berkshires, and the words “country roads” popped into his head.
“I thought that would be a pretty song because I was thinking of my own experience and that a lot of people could share that experience — traveling and going down these country roads,” Danoff said more than 40 years later from his Washington, D.C., home.
While many people associate “Country Roads” with Denver, Danoff’s story also is fascinating, with appearances by President Bill Clinton, before-they-were-stars actors Chris and Susan Sarandon, a cranky former Indiana weatherman named David Letterman and another Danoff-penned hit, a cheeky tune called “Afternoon Delight.”
It started on that day in Maryland, where black-eyed Susans, not rhododendrons, serve as the state flower. Danoff’s train of thought was reignited later that summer when the songwriter drove to a gig in Roanoke, Va., down Interstate 81, where he could see the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River, referenced in the first stanza of the song but existing in West Virginia only around the Eastern Panhandle in Harpers Ferry.
“It’s such a beautiful ride,” Danoff said.
The Shenandoah reminded the songwriter of the Connecticut River, which serves as a border between Connecticut and Massachusetts near his boyhood home.
“I just assumed this river was the boundary between the states,” Danoff said. “I was on the Virginia side and the other side was West Virginia. Of course, that was not correct, but it made me think I had been to West Virginia.
“And so the summer went on, getting into fall, and I was fooling with this song and adding lines.”
Ultimately he decided that “West Virginia” sounded better than “Maryland” or “Massachusetts.”
Although Danoff never had been to the Mountain State at this point, he did have a friend from Beckley, Chris Sarandon, who later starred in “The Princess Bride.” Sarandon was a WVU graduate who had moved to Washington to get a master’s degree at Catholic University, where he met his wife, Susan, the future Oscar-winning actress.
The two couples were friends and Bill and Taffy sometimes stayed at the Sarandons’ apartment after the actors moved to New York City.
Danoff continued to tinker with the song, thinking that the tune would be ideal for Johnny Cash, who had a variety show at the time.
But fate intervened. Danoff had a day job at a Washington, D.C., music club called the Cellar Door where he worked as a doorman and did lights and sound, which gave him the opportunity to see shows by a wide range of rising and established artists, from Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins to comedians Steve Martin and Jay Leno.
Then at night, sometimes he and Taffy would play as a duo called Fat City.
During that time, Danoff became acquainted with Denver, a folk singer who had just left the Chad Mitchell Trio. Denver’s song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” recently had become a hit for another folk trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, and the young singer was on the rise.
“He was getting ready to do an album and he came into town. He was visiting someone and the roommate brought him to the bar where Taffy and I were playing.”
Denver heard Bill and Taffy sing another song Danoff and Nivert had written called “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado,” which references the state Denver eventually would grow to love and live in.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 1970, however, Denver broke his thumb in a car accident. After Denver was treated at an emergency room, Danoff and Nivert found themselves up in the middle of the night with Denver, who was wide awake thanks to a dose of painkillers.
“He said, ‘Play something,'” Danoff recalled.
Eventually, Danoff started to perform the song about country roads that he had been working on.
“John, as was his manner, would be all enthusiastic, saying, ‘Wow, golly, that’s far out! That’s a great song! That’s a hit song.'”
He asked Bill and Taffy if they had recorded the tune.
“I said, ‘We don’t have a record deal.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a record deal. I’m doing a record now. I’d love to do that song.'”
First, they had to finish the song, which required working on the second verse, the one that starts off with, “All my memories gathered ’round her; Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.”
“At that point, it was like doing a crossword puzzle, coming up with the words and filling in the lines,” Danoff said. “I knew where the spaces were. I never had been to West Virginia and Taffy had been through it on her way to college, so we started throwing out anything we could think of that had to do with West Virginia.”
Taffy looked up West Virginia’s state flower, and she wanted to get it into the lyrics because it had the same meter as “West Virginia.”
“She kept trying to fit the word ‘rhododendron’ in there but John wouldn’t go for that,” Danoff said.
Finally, at 6 in the morning, the trio considered the song finished and took it on a trial run, with Denver snapping his fingers on his good hand.
“It just sounded terrific,” Danoff said.
That night, Denver played his set at the Cellar Door and then brought on Bill and Taffy to introduce “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to the audience.
“They just loved it, and over the years, I’ve met I can’t tell you how many people who were in the audience who said, ‘I was there the first time you did ‘Country Roads.'”
The song did become a hit after Denver included it on his 1971 breakout album, “Poems, Prayers & Promises,” which also featured “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.” Artists all over the world began releasing their own versions, including Olivia Newton-John of Australia, Japanese-Brazilian boss nova singer Lisa Ono and Hawaiian Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, better known for his sweet, ukulele-driven “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
A recent cover was done by singers Brandi Carlile and Emmylou Harris on “The Music Is You: A Tribute to John Denver,” released this spring.
“I love it,” said Danoff, who wrote the song “Boulder to Birmingham” about Gram Parsons with Harris. “I realize it’s Brandi’s record, but being a 40-year friend of Emmy’s, I wish she’d had a verse.”
In 1976, Bill and Taffy, by this time married, had another chance at stardom on the heels of a Grammy Award-winning No. 1 tune Danoff wrote called “Afternoon Delight,” which also has earned a solid spot in pop culture history.
That song led to a tour with Denver as well as a short-lived variety show with emerging comedian David Letterman, who served as the host.
But their connection to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” continued. Eventually, a woman told Bill and Taffy about Harpers Ferry. The couple drove over from Washington to see it.
When they got there, Bill ran his hands through the waters of the Shenandoah River before he noticed a group of girls — singing and playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
He returns to the state sometimes, including in 2008 when he played in front of Woodburn Hall at WVU for a Hillary Clinton campaign appearance by her husband, Bill, a buddy of Danoff’s from Georgetown University.
These days, Danoff also performs at events honoring Denver, who died in 1997 when his experimental aircraft crashed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.
That includes an annual tribute concert in Aspen, Colo., around the anniversary of Denver’s death. The first few times singing “Country Roads” following the accident were tough, he recalled.
“We do four or five shows a year and it’s gotten easier,” he said. “It’s kind of a celebratory thing. The first few years we were in tears. He was a cool guy.”
Danoff does not mind that many people associate “Take Me Home, Country Roads” solely with Denver.
In the early days, as he would prepare to launch into “Almost heaven, West Virginia,” he would tell audiences, “This song bought me my Mercedes.”

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On a late summer day in 1980, 50,000 eager spectators watched as a helicopter flew low over the new Mountaineer Field in Morgantown and touched down behind the brand-new stadium.
Oliver Luck, now the athletic director at WVU, remembers it well. Back then, he was the Mountaineers’ quarterback, playing his first game for Don Nehlen.
“I don’t know whose idea it was but I think it was a great idea to open it up with John Denver coming in and singing ‘Country Roads,'” Luck said. “That was a very clever marketing move that people remember. The helicopter — people still talk about it. I was there at the game. It’s taken on an iconic position in people’s minds.”
Luck was with the other players in the locker rooms, which, he recalled, were “very spartan at the time.”
“We all peeked out the door and we could see the helicopter land,” Luck said. “There was a podium set up on the field and on the podium were various political leaders at the time.”
They included West Virginia U.S. Sens. Robert C. Byrd and Jennings Randolph and Gov. Jay Rockefeller.
It was Rockefeller, Nehlen recalled, who organized the appearance by Denver.
“Without Jay, we wouldn’t have had him,” Nehlen said. “He paid him $25,000 out of his own pocket.”
When fans and officials discuss the opening of Mountaineer Field, the story about Denver and the helicopter comes up, but so does what a difficult process building the stadium had been.
“The governor has never been given credit for what he did for that stadium,” Nehlen continued. “When I came here, they were going to put trailers in the end zones. They didn’t have money for locker rooms. He raised $1.3 million.”
And then he personally organized the memorable performance of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” that has fans still talking today.
Lane Bailey, who served as Rockefeller’s chief of staff after he became a U.S. senator, said bringing Denver in “was not a hard sell. It wasn’t something they had to spend weeks negotiating. But Denver’s schedule had to be worked out. By then, he was a famous artist.”
Three years earlier in 1977, Denver also had co-starred in a hit movie, “Oh, God!” with comedian George Burns.
For those who had been in the thick of the negotiations for the stadium or for those, like Nehlen and Luck, whose careers would be enhanced by it, the performance of the song had even a more special meaning.
“It was such a magic moment,” Bailey said.
The Danoffs had flown in on a plane from Washington with Randolph before the now-famous helicopter ride took them the rest of the way.
Rockefeller, Danoff remembered, bought the songwriter a hot dog.
“I loved that,” he said. “All I wanted was a beer, and I didn’t know it was a dry stadium.”
The Mountaineers played — and won, 41-27 — against the University of Cincinnati.
“It was a big day,” Nehlen remembered.
The old stadium accommodated 35,000 and not all games sold out, so some concern had been expressed about the need for an additional 15,000 seats.
But on that first day, it was packed.
“I was anxious to see how many would show up, and we had it filled,” Nehlen said. “That was a real tribute to fans and the student body, that they came out for that first game.”

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Fans who attend any home football game — and some away games, too — are treated during the pregame show to the Pride of West Virginia marching band playing an adapted version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
The performances began in 1972, several years before the opening of the new Mountaineer Field.
Miltenberger first wrote the arrangement for his jazz trio and then later expanded it for the marching band.
“When it first came out, I thought it was an extremely effective song,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is going to last. This is something that we need to incorporate into our repertoire. I think it’s going to be significant.'”
As a member of his jazz trio, Miltenberger knew he was correct about that prediction when the group played “Country Roads” in places such as Europe and Asia.
“It’s immediately recognized,” he said.
He was playing it in a concert near a castle in Luxembourg on a hillside, urging the audience to join in.
“The whole group started to sing,” he said. “It was echoing in the hills of Luxembourg. I was just astonished.”
The marching band arrangement actually combines “Take Me Home, Country Roads” with a riff from “The West Virginia Hills,” noted both Miltenberger and Jay Drury, the director of athletic bands at WVU.
“It’s a really special arrangement,” Drury said. “I’m proud to be part of that tradition and history.”
And it is just one of many versions of the song, which also has been tackled by a boy choir and a reggae group.
“I’m not sure I can pinpoint what makes a song long-lasting,” Miltenberger said. “There are certain songs that somehow people relate to. Maybe it’s a combination of words. Maybe it’s a catchy melody.
“This is one of a handful of songs that people who are aware of Western culture will sing along to.”
Danoff has given a lot of thought to the worldwide appeal of his song and he came up with a theory:
“By making something specific, it can be more universal. People can draw from it what they need to. If you write something universal, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”