John Denver would sing about country roads taking him home, but guess what? He decided he'd rather live in Colorado, where they have real mountains and don't saw off the top of them to make $5. He actually hated West Virginia, but these other 2 people approached him with a song that they were about to sell to Johnny Cash, and so he decided to make a buck and record it so he could afford to live in Colorado. He actually got rid of his original name, Henry John Deutschendorf, not because it sounded too European, but because it sounded too "West Virginia hillbillyish", and changed it to John Denver, because Denver is his favorite city in the United States. The story goes that whenever he would perform the song, it made him really sad and angry inside because he didn't want to identify himself with anything West Virginian, but felt he had to in order to sell records.
That song always makes me feel sad. Not because John Denver rammed himself into the side of a mountain and lived a life in denial, but because it makes me feel sorry for the people of West Virginia, with their topless hills ...i mean... mountains, their incredibly low literacy rate, and their overal poor hygiene, and well, just poorness.
