John Denver

He was born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. on New Year’s Eve 1943 in Roswell, New Mexico, the son of an Air Force pilot, and the family moved from state to state as he grew up. His grandmother gave him his first guitar, a 1910 Gibson. He studied architecture at Texas Tech University, left without finishing, and went to Los Angeles to sing in folk clubs, where a record producer told him Deutschendorf would not fit on a record label. By the mid-1960s he was performing as John Denver, a name taken from the capital of Colorado.

In 1965 he was chosen from more than 250 hopefuls to replace Chad Mitchell in the Chad Mitchell Trio, by then billed as the Mitchell Trio. With Joe Frazier and Mike Kobluk he recorded for Mercury in New York from August 1965, with Milt Okun producing, and for Reprise in 1966. Life on the road with the trio inspired “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and in 1969 Peter, Paul and Mary took the song to No. 1. In December 1966 he had pressed a private album of his own, John Denver Sings.

RCA Victor released his first solo album, Rhymes & Reasons, in 1969, and Okun went on producing his records through the 1970s. Two more albums followed in 1970, Take Me to Tomorrow and Whose Garden Was This. The breakthrough came with Poems, Prayers & Promises (1971), which had Eric Weissberg on banjo and pedal steel. Its single “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” written with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert and credited to John Denver with Fat City, entered the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1971 and reached No. 2 that August. The same album introduced “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” which he wrote with the guitarist Mike Taylor and Dick Kniss. Aerie, late in 1971, included his version of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans.” Rocky Mountain High (1972) reached No. 4 on the albums chart, and its title song, written with Taylor, was a No. 9 single early in 1973.

The peak years followed. John Denver’s Greatest Hits, issued in November 1973, spent three weeks at No. 1 and 176 weeks on the albums chart, and it sold more than ten million copies. “Sunshine on My Shoulders” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 in March 1974, and “Annie’s Song,” written for his first wife, Annie, held the top spot for two weeks that July. The album Back Home Again went to No. 1 in August 1974, and its title song was a No. 1 country record that November. In 1975 “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and “I’m Sorry” both topped the pop and country charts, and Windsong, with John Sommers on banjo, fiddle and mandolin and Steve Weisberg on Dobro and pedal steel, became his third No. 1 album. Back Home Again was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year, and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” for Best Country Vocal Performance, Male. In all he earned fourteen gold and eight platinum albums in the United States.

His audience reached well beyond records. He made many television specials, two of them with Jim Henson’s Muppets, A Christmas Together and Rocky Mountain Holiday, and starred with George Burns in the 1977 film Oh, God! In 1975 he founded the Windsong label in Snowmass, Colorado; its first act was Danoff and Nivert’s Starland Vocal Band, whose “Afternoon Delight” was a No. 1 single. He founded the Windstar Foundation in 1976 as an environmental education center, served on a presidential commission on hunger, wrote “Calypso” in 1975 for Jacques Cousteau’s research ship, and later started Plant-It 2000 to encourage tree planting around the world. He made his home in Aspen.

His hits came less often after the 1970s, but he kept recording. “Perhaps Love,” his song, became a 1981 duet with the tenor Plácido Domingo. “Some Days Are Diamonds (Some Days Are Stone)” reached No. 10 on the country chart in 1981, “Wild Montana Skies” with Emmylou Harris reached No. 14 in 1983, and the title song of Dreamland Express (RCA, 1985) reached No. 9 early in 1986. In 1985 he became one of the first artists to complete a full concert tour of the Soviet Union, and two years later he went back for a benefit concert for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. After RCA he released records on his own Windstar label, among them Higher Ground (1988) and The Flower That Shattered the Stone (1990). On the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two (Universal, 1989) he sang lead on Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz’s “And So It Goes,” which reached No. 14 on the country chart. He toured China in October 1992, and Legacy issued The Wildlife Concert in 1995.

His last album was All Aboard!, a set of railroad songs released by Sony Wonder in August 1997, with Herb Pedersen on banjo, Gabe Witcher on fiddle, LeRoy McNees on Dobro and Pete Huttlinger on guitar and mandolin. On 12 October 1997 the light experimental plane he was flying, a Long-EZ he had recently bought, crashed into Monterey Bay off Pacific Grove, California. He was 53. The National Transportation Safety Board later found that his attention had been taken up by a hard-to-reach fuel selector handle. All Aboard! won the Grammy for Best Musical Album for Children at the 1998 awards, his only Grammy win. Colorado adopted “Rocky Mountain High” as one of its two state songs in 2007, and West Virginia made “Take Me Home, Country Roads” an official state song in 2014.

• 1975: Entertainer of the Year, Country Music Association
• 1996: Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1998: Grammy Award, Best Musical Album for Children, for All Aboard!
• 2011: Colorado Music Hall of Fame (its first inductee)