John Denver
 

haha, I feel like a dork for loving his one song: Take me Home Country Roads... anyone ever heard or love it too? There is a cover of it made by Olivia Newton John.

Besides that he WAS the first to introduce Leaving on a jet plane which rocks!!

john denver wrote some great songs,....

i think my favorite is this old guitar,....

i could do with out the ONJ stuff though,....fly away is right,....

I don't think it's dorky at all. John Denver was a great songwriter, and a couple of my favorites by him are: Annie's Song, Rocky Mountain High, Take Me Home Country Roads, Leaving on a Jet Plane, and Back Home Again.

As a 9-year-old I made myself mix tapes of the 6 or so JD albums my dad owned. I REALLY liked "Annie's Song," I guess, because I put that one multiple times on there, interspersed between like every four or five other songs.

...I should ask, does anyone know if he did anything respectable in his later career? I remember that "Don't Close Your Eyes" tonight song coming out, which was kind of a nice song, but also very creepy picturing JD having sex. Ug.

no way.... I don't think anyone wants to see that haha:P

Yeah I'll listen to John Denver any day of the week but never do I ever wanna picture him having sex.

Listing to John Denver's Take Me Home Country Road while driving home to visit my Parent in Philadelphia PA from Kentucky is just the best...

Ahh...John Denver. I first heard his songs when they were new, back when I was a tiny tot. I think a babysitter used to sing me "Country Roads" and I would imagine the country road stretching out before me. "Annie's Song" is one of the most beautiful love songs I know of. I always think how sad it is that even a brilliant, poetic song like that...and the feelings that went behind it...weren't enough to keep John Denver and Annie, his first spouse, together. At least they rekindled friendship shortly before his plane accident death...which, sadly, was far from being "dying in her arms." I'm glad he at least had a chance to experience the feelings that inpired him to write "Annie's Song," even if the relationship didn't last.

I quit listening to any J.D. songs after that movie came out where the kids would get killed after hearing J.D. songs... now they give me the creeps!

ok, i just thumbed through a crap load of dvd's in my collection of them and found the name of the movie... It was final destination.

Hehe, BADFASTBUSA, yes, I agree there is at least one John Denver song that gives me the creeps. I managed to survive listening to it as a child, but some of the subjects in the song weren't so lucky! Even as a kid, before I attained my current state of Veggiedom, "Grandma's Feather Bed" seemed a macabre celebration of animal slaughter and chilling childhood acceptance of it, since the tykes are completely unperturbed by the death upon which they feast and sleep, as John Denver describes when he pines away for those times when...

"We'd have chicken pie and country ham,
homemade butter on the bread.
But the best darn thing about Grandma's house
was her great big feather bed.
It was nine feet wide, and six feet high, soft as a downy chick
It was made from the feathers of forty-eleven geese."

Now, I don't know about others, but I never felt particularly lulled to sleep as a child by knowing that I was resting on the feathers plucked from forty-eleven corpses! As an adult I find this callous ode to country butchery even more disturbing.

Also, doesn't it strike anyone as just a teensy bit odd that the kids are dragging into bed a cute "piggy we stole from the shed" whom they will probably soon feast upon as a "country ham?" I have never understood how people could claim to enjoy an animal's presence and then, betraying whatever trust she must have had in them, turn around and kill and eat her as a table treat! Even as a child I realized through songs such as John Denver's "Grandma's Feather Bed" that I was a sheep living in a human wolf pack. Probably understandably, I was quite shy as a child due to this.
--Erica

Very original, he is. A sound that was all his own. It just makes me feel good about life after listening to his music, and I really think that's what he wanted his music to do. So much skill with his acoustic guitar. I admired how he did it all himself too, just his voice and an acoustic guitar, and thats all you want to hear.

I did a review over "Rocky Mountain High" in my Member's Journal.

Hi, Flower Child,
Yes, I agree that his songs do make me feel better about life after listening to them...even "Grandma's Feather Bed" (despite my aforementioned complaint about aspects of this song, it's basic idea of appreciating one's family and simple, happy times is lovely).
--Erica

country roads
 

yeah - this song is really big in Europe for some reason. I play covers in pubs in Berlin and it is a standard. All the pub owners insist that we play it. I heard a rumour that John Denver is german. Anyone know if it is true?

Hi, T-Bomb,
How funny that "Grandma's Feather Bed" is popular in Germany right now. Do the pub owners insist you play other country/folk songs, too? What do you think is the lure of John Denver in Germany right now? Is it a sort of "return to simpler times," go out hiking in the woods thing? I recall that going out on family hikes was very popular when I lived in West Berlin for a year not long before the wall came down.

I looked up John Denver's life info on Wikipedia to verify that no, he was not German, although he had German ancestry. Wikipedia states:

"Denver was born in Roswell, New Mexico, to Erma Louise Swope and Henry John Deutschendorf, Sr., an Air Force officer and flight instructor of German ancestry. In his autobiography Take Me Home, Denver described his life as the eldest son of a family shaped by a stern father who could never show his love for his children. Denver's mother's family was Scots-Irish and German Catholic, and it was they who imbued Denver with a love of music. His maternal grandmother gave him his first guitar when he was seven."

--Erica

Enough chit-chat. Time for music. I love this song by John.

Apparently there was a tribute album that came out in 2013 if anyone want's to hear other people's interpretations of his work by some contemporary artists of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mu...to_John_Denver

This was what brought it to my attention from a friend who writes/performs folk tunes:
https://soundcloud.com/ato_records/s...s-are-diamonds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es-Q9_eG7e4
this is so hard

Wow! That's quite a thread-bump, Mindfulness. Thanks.

Not really a fan of John Denver, but he went up in my estimation the day I learned that he had written my favourite Peter Paul and Mary song, Leaving On A Jet Plane.. This performance by JD + Mama Cass is top quality too:-



(Bonus points to Cass Elliot for promoting voter registration.)

I've often used the PP&M version of the song in my English classes, because it has so much in its favour: clearly ennunciated lyrics sung at a gentle pace, great job of setting a scene with easy vocabulary, a sentiment and story the whole world can understand, and to top it off, a haunting melody.

That's a nice song^ I always jammed to a few of his famous songs but that remix I bumped with just had been on repeat.

Yes, I notice that Take Me Home Country Roads gets a lot of love in this thread!
"West Virginia" doesn't convey a lot to me, but I heard of the Blue Ridge Mountains from Doc Watson, when I got this "Essential" album long ago:-

harmonicas in songs are awesome :love:

It means mountain shacks and ****ing your cousin.

Man critics sure hated the f*ck out of this guy back in the day.

Sure some of his stuff is a bit on the corny side but he was like Bob Ross levels of nice why would you put so much energy into hating a guy like that?

In England, no hatred for JD but he was usually treated as a kind of joke or byword for corny: impossible for cool guys to like. I just knew one girl who was a self-confessed JD fan, and she was so into country that she would dress up for concerts:- Very nice person in fact, which perhaps says something about country music/JD fans - or at least it would if we can consider 1 as a statistically significant sampling.

:laughing: Thanks for that insight, Batlord!

I went to school with a guy who, for an initiation to join the Varsity Club, was forced to sing Take Me Home Country Roads because he was literally John Denver's doppelganger. :laughing: