Lessons from Take Me Home Country Roads

You may have heard it at a football game in an advertisement or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand at Oktoberfest in Belgium or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays the song Take Me Home Country Roads is ubiquitous unmistakable universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff Taffy Nivert and John Denver in 1971 the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages. <p/> This book examines Country Roads as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining Country Roads as anthem text artifact and rhetoric this work untangles ideas related to place belonging identity and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term <i>hiraeth</i> which is an existential longing for an idealized sometimes imaginary home as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs external perceptions of the state concepts of home and belonging and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. Take Me Home Country Roads while being about West Virginia has registered as a global phenomenon.