John Denver broke his thumb in a car accident after a show in Washington, DC, on December 29, 1970. He went to the emergency room, got it splinted, and went straight to his opening act’s apartment anyway because they said they had something for him to hear. He sat down with a splinted thumb and asked what they’d been working on.
Bill Danoff had been sitting on a half-finished song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” for about a month. He’d written it with his girlfriend Taffy Nivert, and they’d planned to pitch it to Johnny Cash. It was a country ballad about winding roads and going home, and it had a chorus they loved, but they couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of it. When Denver knocked on the door that night, Danoff wasn’t sure he should even play it. “He won’t like that,” he told Nivert quietly. “It’s for Johnny Cash.” She told him to play it anyway.
Denver heard the chorus and one verse and said he’d flipped over it. He asked if he could help finish it, and the 3 of them stayed up through the night working on the lyrics. The road that gave Danoff the idea was a winding two-lane stretch called Clopper Road in Montgomery County, Maryland—he’d been driving it on the way to a family reunion when the chorus started coming to him. He’d thought about writing it about Massachusetts, the state he’d grown up in, but the word didn’t feel right in the song. He went with West Virginia instead because of a radio program he’d listened to as a kid. None of the 3 of them had ever set foot in the state.
Related: Stevie Nicks Had $40 and Was About to Quit Music in 1973 When She Wrote ‘Landslide’ in 5 Minutes; Later Fleetwood Mac Called
They finished it on the morning of December 30, 1970. That was the day before Denver’s 27th birthday. He announced that the song had to go on his next album. Johnny Cash was out of the picture. That night, Denver went back to the Cellar Door, and when he ran out of songs, he pulled out the new one as an encore. He hadn’t learned the words yet. Someone taped the handwritten lyric sheet to the mic stand so he could read while he played. A singer-songwriter named Len Jaffe was in the room that night. “It was a 5-minute standing ovation,” Jaffe said later. “The walls were vibrating. I thought the club was going to implode.”
The Song Nobody Saw Coming
Denver recorded it in New York in January 1971 and released it as a single on April 12. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was his first platinum single. West Virginia made it the official state song in 2014. It’s been performed before every West Virginia University home football game since 1972. This past summer, it became the unofficial anthem of the US men’s national team at the 2026 World Cup. Denver died on October 12, 1997, at 53 when the small plane he was piloting went down over Monterey Bay. Yesterday marked 29 years. The song still belongs to everyone.
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