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Almost Heaven: The Night John Denver Wrote a State Anthem for a Place He’d Never Been
Almost Heaven: The Night John Denver Wrote a State Anthem for a Place He’d Never Been On the night of December 30, 1970, in a basement folk club in Georgetown called the Cellar Door, John Denver stood on a small stage holding a sheet of paper covered in handwriting so fresh the ink might have…
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John Denver: The Heart Behind the Highs
John Denver sang about love the way he sang about mountains — with total, unironic devotion. When he sang “Annie’s Song,” you believed every word, because he clearly did. But the man behind the gentle image lived a more complicated romantic life than his songs let on: a second marriage that burned bright and brief,…
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How John Denver Turned a Sailing Ship into “Calypso”: The B-Side That Became an Anthem
In the summer of 1975, John Denver was the biggest star in American music. He had the number one album, the number one single, the television specials, the sold-out arenas. And then, almost as an afterthought, he tucked a song onto the back of a 45 — a B-side, the side nobody was supposed to…
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The Untold Story of John Denver: The Sunshine Boy with Shadows
He was the clean-cut troubadour of the 1970s, the blond grinning kid with the wire-rimmed glasses singing about mountains and country roads. John Denver sold the world a vision of pure, sunlit innocence — and for a while, America bought it completely. He was the best-selling performer in the country in the mid-seventies, with four…