“Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver

"Take Me Home, Country Roads" came out as a John Denver single on April 12, 1971, a song he wrote with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, and it's the kind of sweet homesick sing-along that makes even hardened city types misty for somewhere they've never lived. That somewhere is West Virginia, named right at the top of the song, and the state has claimed it ever since: in March 2014 it became one of the state's four official anthems.

It climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, went gold that August and platinum decades later, in 2017, and it has never stopped selling. The Grammy Hall of Fame took in Denver's recording in 1998, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2023.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.