![]() About the time I was first starting to play guitar and sing for other people, John Denver exploded in popularity, on the heels of " Country Roads" which rocketed to #2 in 1971, the year I graduated from high school in Maryland, not far from West Virginia. In 1976 Newsweek called him the ".most popular pop singer in America," and mixed into his 30-year musical legacy are fourteen Gold and eight Platinum albums.įirst a little disclaimer/backstory. Swift is still growing and unfolding and not ready for summaries, so let's take good look at Denver through the troubadour lens of our viewfinder. I am an advocate for the solo troubadour art form, and while researching the handful of instances when mega-popular American music has featured this kind of performance, I found that no chart-topping song has consisted of simply a person playing a song since 1928, when Jimmie Rodgers "The Singing Brakeman" had a smash #1 hit phenomenon with his guitar and yodeling on the blues-tinged " T For Texas (Blue Yodel #1)." I also found out that during those 89 years since 1928, the only two of what we might call "acoustic-guitar powered" troubadours who have had a significant presence on the pop music charts over an entire decade were Taylor Swift and John Denver. Who hasn't at least heard of John Denver? Now even my middle-school age kids and their friends are singing " Take Me Home, Country Roads" as some kind of an internet meme, after a long slack period when arguably the best-selling pop artist of the 1970s had seemingly faded into whichever sunset was appropriate for cheesy folk-pop icons. ![]() Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., later known as "John Denver," born in Roswell, New Mexico (!), improbably became the best-selling and among the most "uncool" troubadours ever, with what turns out to be an unusual and mostly untold story. ![]() The Considerable Mystery of the Highest-Flying Troubadour ![]()
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