John Denver's Country Road isn't so Country Anymore

Country roads, take me home. Some of the most recognizable lines in music. The state anthem of West Virginia, written by two people who’d never been to West Virginia about a road in…Maryland.

At least in my generation (I’m a 2001 kid), “Country Roads” is the first thing that comes to mind when you say West Virginia. When I led an overnight camping trip in WV last year, the campers requested we wake them up not with an alarm, but with “Country Roads.” We were just over the Potomac River in Jefferson County, an outlier among the rest of the state for a myriad of reasons, but to them, this was a foreign land, only experienced in song. We got hopelessly snowed in later that day.

While “Country Roads” is without a doubt a love song for the Mountain State, it was inspired by Clopper Road, in Montgomery County, MD. Bill and Taffy Nivert were inspired to write a song about winding country roads while on a drive in rural MoCo. While I jokingly replace West Virginia with Maryland while singing in my car, our state name doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. I don’t think most people associate Maryland with the homeland John Denver paints in the song either.

John Denver almost never sang “Country Roads.” Supposedly, the Nivert’s first choice for who should sing their song was Johnny Cash. As incredible as Cash was, I just don’t think his voice would have carried the same impact Denver’s does. Oh, and by the way, Denver had never been to West Virginia before his hit single became a timeless classic, which shows in the lyrics. Two geographical features mentioned in the opening verse, the Shenandoah River and the Blue Ridge Mountains, are primarily Virginian features. Both knick WV’s panhandle on their way northward, but still don’t compare with the rest of the state, like the New River or taller peaks farther inland. This has led some people to believe the song is about west Virginia, as in the western part of Virginia, where the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah dominate. But Denver then sings about Coal Country, which while in Virginia too, is a more significant part of West Virginia’s history than its parent, and come on, no matter what Denver meant, the song is about West Virginia now.

Clopper Road in 1970 could’ve been considered a country road. At that time, Gaithersburg was home to just 8500 people; today, it’s Maryland’s 4th largest city, with 60,000 residents. Germantown didn’t even take a census until 1980, when it had 8000 people. Now it has 90,000, more than Frederick and Annapolis. During the Nivert’s drive, it would’ve been a single lane road through small homes and farms towards the Seneca Creek Valley. Today, it’s 4 lanes, and hardly reminiscent of a country road. The ultimate irony of this story is that today, Clopper Road is one of MoCo’s main arteries of suburban sprawl towards Frederick County. While not on Clopper Road, the town of Clarksburg wasn’t really a place growing up. Now, it has a outdoor shopping mall.

So next time you crank up the volume as you cross the Potomac into the Mountain State, keep in mind that country roads take Marylanders home too.