Take Us Home, Country Roads
A long and intimate journey of my relationship with the song. Just like a Country Road.
In November 2010, I was a student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. I was part of the South Asian A cappella group, Taal Tadka where I would go on to become the Music Director a few months later. Our group was about to embark on a growth spurt as we were invited by Carnegie Mellon’s Deewane to perform at an event called Sa Re Ga Ma Pella. That event was an eye opener for us since we finally got to interact with other groups like us and we had a lot of catching up to do. But a cappella is a story for another day. What takes us closer to the story is the journey we took from Atlanta to Pittsburgh.
We were a group of 12 students who really couldn’t afford round trip flight tickets to Pittsburgh so the next best option was renting two sedans where we stuffed 6 of us in each car and drove through the night. Road trips with the right people are amazing. Nothing beats your drool being wiped out by your best friends while we zoomed past North Carolina. The members of our car had a majority of night owls, we’ve all done all nighters with each other at some point. Now, most people who have pulled all nighters will attest to this:
There is a moment in the night where everything comes to a standstill. We feel a momentary control of time before our body comes to realize that it will be morning again and the night mode has to turn off. It may be the adrenaline or some magic but it does exist.
For me in 2010, it was when I saw hints of day break that teased us with outlines of the mountains we had been driving through the night. There was an intrigue of the magnificence that surrounded us and that was the spark that got my engine going again. We were driving through the Appalachian range and as the exits suggested, this part was called: The Blue Ridge Mountains.
To me and many of the readers, we have a Pavlovian reaction to the phrase, “Blue Ridge Mountains”. We almost have to sing along and say, “Shenandoah River”. I speak of course, of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ or as most of us in India called it, just ‘Country Roads’. When I chose this song as my focus for this piece, I ended up reflecting on my journey with the song with some very pleasant diversions. I hope you all enjoy the ride as much as I have.
I grew up in Bangalore, India and went to the esteemed Bishop Cotton Boys’ School where we wore perfectly ironed uniforms (Thanks Mom) and then attended the daily assembly where we heard about announcements of the day, cheered our classmates who won something and took a moment of silence if someone from the 5000+ student family was bereaved. We then broke off into a smaller assembly which was organized by age group. The junior school assembly started from the left facing the erstwhile school hall while the students of grade 11 and 12 regrouped further down right outside their classrooms.
This secondary assembly was slightly more informal and each class and section took turns hosting this. We would have a prayer, a Bible reading, a talk and more often than not, a musical performance.
Why did I just share a memoir? I’ll explain.
The musical performance at assembly often encouraged us to play instruments. So here we saw kids barely holding up a guitar and singing. For some reason, ‘Country Roads’ was played once a month by someone. It was only years later when I learnt to play the guitar I understood why. The entire song could be played in 4 chords (usually, G, D, E minor and C). Yes, I know that there are more intricacies to perfect it but the 12 year old had the daunting task to get through the song, so we will go with it. The other contender for beginner guitar song was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ but trying to emulate Bob Dylan is a tricky endeavor. So Country Roads it was. So by the time I finished school, I just knew Country Roads as a part of my life. ‘Almost Heaven, West Virginia’ was a memory of standing in line in school while praying that I don’t get caught for dust settled on my shoes by a prefect.
This may be a good time to share the origin story of the song. It was sung by John Denver, whose real name is Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. So the last name ‘Denver’ was adopted later. It was enough however, to ponder over why someone with a reference to Denver found West Virginia to be ‘Almost Heaven’ and I dug deeper. Turns out the choice of West Virginia as the state in the song was just by chance as it was a four syllable name, just like the contender - Massachusetts, which happened to be where Bill Danoff, one of the songwriters grew up. The idea for the song came while he and his then wife and co-songwriter Taffy Nivert were driving in Maryland. The country road they were on reminded him of his hometown which had similar roads. He had a guitar in hand and the first version of this song came to life. It is said that Taffy Nivert spent all night going through a pre-internet tool called an encyclopedia to get all the references possible to West Virginia to write the full song. So in reality, the song was something between a research paper and an unintentional marketing campaign for the state, which is beautiful by the way.
With this we come back to my life and this song. I thought Country Roads had a one-off Bangalore connection but when I made new friends in college, turns out most Christian schools in South India sang this song for different purposes. For instance, Montfort is a boarding school in the hills of Yercaud, Tamil Nadu. Georgia Tech alumni and director of films like Rockford (known for the song ‘Yaaron’ by the late KK and also a fictional version of the school), Hyderabad Blues and Iqbal, studied there as well. A relatively more recent alum was also my buddy from college. One night, as one would do over fermented malts and barley at the back of a fraternity house, we reminisced school life and he mentioned how his school used to sing Country Roads as the official farewell song at the end of every school year for those who were graduating.
Then the plot thickened, one of my best friends and college roommate is probably the best musician I know. The best part of staying with each other was a live jam session was never far away. One time, he began playing the riff of another John Denver song, “Annie’s Song” but began singing in Bangla! Turns out this version was big in Bangladesh. As we were on the topic of Denver, I asked him if he knew of Country Roads and in seconds, a Bangladeshi and an Indian were screaming about how they belonged in West Virginia. In fact, life did come a full circle when both of us entered West Virginia during the earlier mentioned road trip.
So somehow the Shenandoah river flows metaphorically through the subcontinent. But what about the actual land of the free and home of the brave? Short answer. Everyone loves it. But everyone has their own story with the song. It was luck that stumbled upon one of the more important lyrical stakeholders of the song.
I’ll explain further.
Just north of Atlanta are the suburbs of Vinings and Smyrna. There is an ambiguous area between the two which is officially called Atlanta since Home Depot which is headquartered there wanted an Atlanta address. Unofficially, this area is called Sminings. The Sminings area rose to fame over the past few years as it became home to the 2021 World Series Champions, Atlanta Braves. Just a little more than a mile down the road is home to another hallowed institution, Laseters Tavern. When I moved to the area in 2013, I chanced upon this bar one Saturday afternoon where Michelle welcomed me with a smile and asked what I would like to drink. Within less than a minute, I had a fat bottle of beer from Michigan called, Founders Breakfast Stout and I was away.
It may sound cliche that this bar is just like the one in Cheers but just Southern and always welcoming to that Indian kid who sat at the bar. The walls are plastered with so much history and culture of the area. We have every possible memorabilia of the Braves, GT Yellow Jackets and Georgia Bulldogs along with framed newspaper clippings of many big moments the great city of Atlanta experienced. However, towards the right of the bar, something stands out as it doesn’t conform to the rest of the decorations. A lot of flags and banners had “WV” and “West Virginia” on them.
Considering Bangalore, Yercaud and Dhaka proudly sang about the state of West Virginia, a bar in suburban Atlanta shouldn’t be as surprising. I soon found out that this bar was the official bar for local University of West Virginia alumni to come and watch their college team play football. I almost sarcastically asked Michelle, “So a bunch of people just come here, get drunk and sing Country Roads?!’. She very seriously said, “Yes”. I didn’t have to wait too long but there was a West Virginia game a few weeks later and the bar was packed. It was loud and wild. West Virginia one and they partook in singing their state song, you already know what it was. It hit differently to me when I experienced this. It was the first time I heard someone singing Country Roads because of a West Virginia connection. Took me 22 years, but it was special.
There are a couple of very honorable versions of Country Roads which I need to talk about before really wrapping this multi-era, multi-continent blabbering. First it is the very emotional version from the film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle. The song is performed by Mark Strong who plays the otherwise stoic Merlin in a scene where he has stepped on a land mine in what looks like Cambodia. He sacrifices his life so his colleagues can proceed in the mission. He does so by creating a diversion and bring the guards towards him. He achieves this by singing Country Roads in the most Scottish accent ever. The musical arrangement makes it a ballad and it is juxtaposed with Merlin beating up each guard (including a head butt) without lifting his foot off the mine. As more reinforcement surfaces, he knows that the end is near. He does a scale change the song to a higher key as more guards approach before detonating the mine and taking everyone’s life including his. Grown men still cry while watching this scene.
Next, it is the duet sung by the characters, Dwight Schrute and Andy Bernard in the US version of The Office. They are competing with each other trying to woo the receptionist Erin. While the performance was done for comedic acclaim, it was a great musical piece. It features them playing a guitar and banjo while switching lyrics between English and German. Hearing the song in German opens a whole new dimension to what one must feel about the song. However, the English version is very popular in Germany as well.
I’m pleased to share a first hand experience at Oktoberfest 2022 in Munich where I experienced more than 300 people in a Festhalle sing Country Roads with a liter of beer in their hand while jubilantly maintaining a balance on the bench despite a strong buzz. It felt surreal how this song has been a part of my carry on emotional baggage from Bangalore to Atlanta to Munich over 15 years. I almost feel like it sits in the pouch right next to my passport and it is a must have if I have to go places.
It is difficult to conclude on this story as the song means so much to so many people, so the best I can do is speculate for a minute. Why do we all relate to this song so much? Do we all have “country roads” that “take us home”? Does the uphill Hayes Road in Bangalore trigger the same emotion as one drives down Cobb Parkway to reach Laseters in Atlanta? Maybe, the feeling of familiarity a couple of turns before getting home is what gets everyone going. It could be that pothole that never got fixed properly or that eatery where the owner waves you a welcome home even after all these years. Thanks to Country Roads, a much larger population can emotionally express what it means to go home, wherever that may be.