Trivia / John Denver

• Breakup Breakout: Denver was a member of folk group The Chad Mitchell Trio for a couple of years in The '60s but went on to far greater success as a solo artist.
• Chart Displacement: He has topped both the country and Hot 100 charts multiple times, but "Take Me Home, Country Roads", one of his signature songs, did neither — it only got to #2 on the Hot 100 and #50 on the country charts. "Rocky Mountain High" also got to #9 on the Hot 100, and didn't make the country charts at all, but it's still not unheard of to hear the song on a country station.
• Colbert Bump: An odd case of a musician who got a big boost from The Tonight Show by guest-hosting it, as he did on several occasions for Johnny Carson.
• Referenced by...: In Whisper of the Heart, Shizuku attempts to write a Japanese-language translation for "Take Me Home, Country Roads" for her school choir, but has trouble coming up with something satisfying; at one point, she instead crafts parody lyrics about the oppressive bleakness of overurbanization. The film is also bookended by different cover versions of the song: Olivia Newton-John's English-language rendition at the start (as it was a big hit in Japan), and Yoko Honna's Japanese-language rendition at the end.
• What Could Have Been: Denver was among the candidates to be the first civilian to go to space and was almost booked on the Space Shuttle Challenger.
• Write What You Know: You'd be surprised to learn how many of John's original songs owe their existence to this trope. Some key examples:
  • "This Old Guitar" is about his very first guitar, which his grandma had given to him when he was a boy.
  • "Love Again" was written after he met his second wife, Cassandra, following his divorce from Annie.
  • "Seasons of the Heart" foreshadows the aforementioned separation; likewise, "Falling Out of Love" deals with the aftermath.

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