Today, the song “remains an anthem across time, space, and context, even after 50 years,” according to Sarah Morris, assistant professor of English and coordinator of undergraduate writing at WVU. Her own experiences with the song, along with its historical and rhetorical legacy, inspired her to use it as a teaching tool and to research and write the book, “Lessons from ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads:’ Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes.”
In her book, from WVU Press, Morris recalls the song’s frequent and often unexpected appearances throughout her life. Shortly after her birth in West Virginia, her family moved briefly to Utah before returning to the Mountain State. During that time away, the song brought pangs of homesickness to her parents. Decades later, as a graduate student at the University of Maryland, Morris heard the song’s notes echoing across campus one evening from the soccer stadium and stopped to listen, transfixed by her own longing for home.
Like many Mountaineers, she has also encountered the song in unlikely places during travels abroad. While in Japan on a teacher exchange program, she heard a middle school marching band perform it; in Bangkok, a Thai band played it in a curry shop.
Why did a song about West Virginia become a global phenomenon, spawning nearly 300 recorded versions in English and translated versions in more than 20 other languages, including Romanian, Hebrew and Slovenian?
The song achieves generality, Morris argues, because it mentions West Virginia but is not about West Virginia — it expresses a universal longing for home. Fittingly, some of its earliest fans were military personnel serving in Vietnam.
Morris connects the song’s appeal with a Welsh concept called hiraeth — an “unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have existed.”
Many have noted that the song’s landmarks — “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River” — evoke neighboring states. Only from one vantage point within West Virginia, at Harper’s Ferry, is the song geographically accurate.
It is unsurprising, then, that its primary writers, Taffy Nivert and Bill Danoff, found its inspiration on a drive through Maryland rather than on our state’s own country roads. Danoff had never even visited West Virginia before the song’s release, and Denver had made only a few appearances within the state during the late 1960s with his band The Mitchell Trio. Nivert had some familiarity with the Northern Panhandle from her time attending college in Steubenville, Ohio.
West Virginians’ eager embrace of the song reflected a hunger for positive portrayals, something rare in preceding decades. Economic problems had driven statewide population loss beginning in the 1950s. Meanwhile, poverty and social problems in Appalachia drew attention from national policymakers and media.
For example, Morris quotes a 1959 article in “The Nation,” portraying the “shaggy, shoeless children of the unwanted — the ‘hillbilly’ coal miners who have been displaced by machines and largely left to rot on surplus government food and the small doles of a half-hearted welfare state.”
By 1971, the state’s economic prospects were improving slightly. A decade of positive population growth was beginning. A folk music revival was sparking interest in Appalachian culture, and a burgeoning environmental movement was encouraging homesteaders — including friends of Danoff and Nivert — to settle here.
No wonder that an optimistic, if simplistic, vision of West Virginia had more appeal than gritty realism.
“When our story is told with love and longing instead of disdain and deficit,” Morris writes, “we easily embrace that narrative, even if it is told from the outside.”