About Take Me Home, Country Roads

"Take Me Home, Country Roads", also known simply as "Country Roads", is a song written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver about West Virginia. It was released as a single performed by Denver on April 12, 1971, peaking at number two on Billboard's US Hot 100 singles for the week ending August 28, 1971. The song was a success on its initial release and was certified Gold by the RIAA on August 18, 1971, and Platinum on April 10, 2017. The song became one of John Denver's most popular and beloved songs. It has continued to sell, with over 1.6 million digital copies sold in the United States. The song has a prominent status as an iconic symbol of West Virginia, which it describes as "Almost Heaven". In March 2014, it became one of the four official state anthems of West Virginia.

Inspiration for the title line had come while Nivert and Danoff, who were married, were driving along Clopper Road in Montgomery County, Maryland to a Nivert family gathering in Gaithersburg, with Nivert behind the wheel while Danoff played his guitar. "I just started thinking, country roads, I started thinking of me growing up in western new England and going on all these small roads," Danoff said. "It didn’t have anything to do with Maryland or anyplace." To Danoff, the lyric "(t)he radio reminds me of my home far away" in the bridge is quintessentially West Virginian, an allusion to when he listened to the program Saturday Night Jamboree, broadcast from Wheeling, West Virginia, on WWVA at his home in Springfield, Massachusetts during his childhood in the 1950s. Danoff had some other West Virginia associations to draw from as well. He became friends with actor Chris Sarandon as well as a group of hippies from a West Virginia commune who used to sit in the front row of the little clubs in which his groups used to play: "They brought their dogs and were a very colorful group of folks, but that is how West Virginia began creeping into the song," Danoff said. He briefly considered using his home state of "Massachusetts", rather than "West Virginia", as both four-syllable state names would have fit the song's meter. "I didn't want to write about Massachusetts because I didn't think the word was musical. And the Bee Gees, of course, had a hit record called "Massachusetts", but what did I know?" Danoff said.