‘Country Roads’ is a World Cup hit. Why doesn’t Fort Worth know about John Denver?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Denver lived in Fort Worth 1957–1961 and graduated Arlington Heights High.
- “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was sung at the FIFA World Cup singalong.
- Denver co-founded the Hunger Project and the Windstar Project and supported UNICEF.
John Denver is famous all over again, and his old Fort Worth friends should not be surprised.
Denver lived here in the Western Hills North neighborhood, worked and went to church on Camp Bowie Boulevard and played football and graduated at Arlington Heights High School.
Yet he is less well known here than fellow westsiders Betty Buckley, Kelly Clarkson or the late Bill Paxton. There’s no street named for him like for Leon Bridges. The plaque remembering Denver at Heights’ auditorium has no devoted visitors like at Townes Van Zandt’s grave.
When the worldwide popularity of his 1972 song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was on display again as a FIFA World Cup singalong, the most common reaction on social media was, “I didn’t know he was from Fort Worth.”
Yes.
And as a teenager, he hated it here.
As the “Air Force brat” son of a bomber plant B-58 test pilot transferred here from Alabama, Denver — real name John Henry Deutschendorf Jr. — later wrote about how he felt shunned by friends in his time here from 1957 to 1961.
But some of his classmates and teachers always remembered him. In 1980, he spoke about world hunger to his old friends at Ridglea Presbyterian Church. When he came back to sing at Will Rogers Auditorium two weeks before his 1997 death, he played golf with friends, shared meals at classmate Mike Smith’s Paris Coffee Shop and celebrated legendary former Heights chemistry teacher Dona Stovall.
When Denver died, the late Rev. Clifford Williams remembered how he was a shy teenager whom church members asked to sing two songs at a family night dinner in the basement fellowship hall.
He asked, “Do you think I can do it?” Williams later told the Star-Telegram.
He sang “Old Shep,” which he later joked was almost the only song he knew.
Afterward, he asked Williams, “How did I do?“
A grandmother from Oklahoma, Mattie Swope, had given him an old Gibson guitar.
He was already a chorus student at church and in a Heights choir that also included future star Delbert McClinton.
When a Heights track meet conflicted with the school talent show, he chose the talent show.
But when he auditioned for the music review at the then-new Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, he didn’t make it. He wound up working on the little sports car ride.
The way a church member tells it, his father often said, “You know, if Johnny would just get rid of that guitar, he might make something of himself.”
He did fine.
Fort Worth sang along with 1970s hits like “Rocky Mountain High” and “Back Home Again,” but Denver had been gone 15 years. We didn’t know much about his co-founding the Hunger Project or the Windstar Project for ocean conservation or his fundraising for UNICEF.
In 1985, he was welcomed as the first U.S. performer in years to tour the Soviet Union. But audiences wished they could see Michael Jackson or Prince. Then, in 1992, he became one of the first Americans in decades to tour China.
In 1980, he had sung “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to open the new West Virginia University football stadium, and it became a crowd singalong after games.
That predates Boston Red Sox fans’ launching singalongs of “Sweet Caroline.”
When the NFL started scheduling games in Europe, players were surprised that fans began singing “Country Roads.”
It has become an Americana song, not solely a West Virginia song. That’s fitting because Denver’s co-author, Bill Danoff, was remembering country roads in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He had never been to West Virginia.
The key line in the song is “Radio reminds me of my home far away,” a reference to the old-time days of AM radio and country music shows broadcast cross-country.
Danoff remembered growing up in Massachusetts and hearing the “Wheeling Jamboree” from a 50,000-watt station in Wheeling, West Virginia.
The song came out during the Vietnam War, giving it an even stronger tie to nostalgia for home and countryside.
It took a few years. But John Denver even grew to have nostalgia for Fort Worth.
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