1976, age 4. "Take Me Home, Country Roads," by John Denver, from Poems, Prayers, and Promises.
When I was a kid, John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," was ubiquitous. It didn't strike me as unusual at the time that there should be a song about my home that was on the radio everywhere. It seemed just the soundtrack for my early childhood, too, when my family was making car trips over mountain roads to visit family in the southern coalfields.
The song has had rather ridiculous staying power as well. The band at my alma mater, West Virginia University, still plays it every single football and basketball game. You can hear it from buskers in Times Square. My friend Scott Simons once told me he once played to a crowd who sang along with every word - in Japan. One time I was standing in front of St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh and heard the familiar melody coming from a Scottish piper in full highland regalia. Everybody seems to know the words, too. Several have pointed to supposed geographic flaws in the song, but both the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah can be found, if only slightly, within the state's borders.
Many assume that "Country Roads" is the state song, but that title belongs to "West Virginia Hills." The jaunty 6/8 march dates to 1885 with a Victorian lyric that is at times saccharine. It used to be that every school child in the state learned "West Virginia Hills," but that seems no longer the case. It is still sung regular at 4-H camps, just after the pledge of allegiance is recited. It recently got some air time from actress Jennifer Garner on the Conan O'Brien show when she claimed that it was sung on Christmas Eve at church growing up and then sang most of the first verse.
Actually, according the website of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, there are three official state songs. The other two are "West Virginia, My Sweet Home," by Col. Julian G. Hearne, Jr., an attorney and career military officer, and "This is My West Virginia," by Charleston musician Iris Bell. Alas, these two are rarely performed and I could find no more than the lyric to each when I searched online.
It does bring up an interesting subject to me, however. For such a small state, there seem to be a lot of songs about West Virginia.
At least two of our state colleges and numerous high schools annually use a choral piece entitled "My Home Among the Hills," sung at graduations and other school events. It has also been sung several times by the All-State Chorus.
"West Virginia, My Home," is among my favorites. It's by Mercer County native and bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens, though I first heard it sung by Ginny Hawker. Among fans of older country styles, this has almost become a de facto state song.
Philanthropist Lyle Clay, who has two major performance venues in the state named for him, penned "West Virginia's Home to Me."
Hancock County native and alternative music savant Daniel Johnston refers to the state multiple times in songs, but he gives a very fitting homage in "Wild West Virginia."
Then there's Phil Ochs "The Hills of West Virginia," Doyle Lawson's "The Girl from West Virginia," and Chicago's "West Virginia Fantasies." The list goes on and on, and if you include songs that don't have the name of the state in the title, the list seems endless. In fact, most of my songwriter and composer friends from West Virginia have written at least one song about the state. (I'd recommend Craig Heath's "Let's Raise a Glass (To Ol' West Virginia)" and Scott Simons' holiday classic, "Chanukah in West Virginia.")
The thing is, when you spend time with these songs you begin to notice a theme, one that is a little unexpected in songs extolling the state's virtues: most of the songs are about leaving.
I'm not sure when this first hit me, but I remember being a little struck by this melancholy note sounded in song after song. Not all of them, surely, but a very large number.
Some of them are very obviously about leaving the state, for example, country singer Kathy Mattea's "Leaving West Virginia." She sings:
I'm leaving West Virginia in the morning
And I'm headin' out that California way
I don't know what I'll find but baby it's my time
And I'll surely leave my heart below the Mason-Dixon line.
Hazel Dickens' expresses a similar sentiment. Dickens wrote her tribute as a young woman when the economy forced her family to relocate to Baltimore. Her voice, full of country pathos, is perfect for the lyric:
It's been years now since I left there
And this city life's not one I thought I'd find
Can't remember why I left so free what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be
But I can sure remember where I come from.
I think the motif is noteworthy. Many of the songs speaking of "roaming" far from home and one senses how bittersweet that is for the singer. She loves the green hills, she loves the smell of honeysuckle in the early summer, and she loves the old homeplace where mother is buried, but she can't stay there any longer. The mines have closed, there's nothing for her, and now she has to set out on her own, usually all alone.
The theme is found in other southern songs, I suppose. One thinks of "Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny," or "Old Kentucky Home," and it's a common enough trope. There is probably a reason for that. The difference in West Virginia is that the idea seems to persist well into modern songwriting.
I've written elsewhere about my mixed feelings for my native state. One often hears the state's leaders speak of "keeping people" here. But there is this nagging feeling I have that when we speak of "keeping them" here, we mean crippling them, clipping their wings, so that they couldn't leave if they wanted to. (Although it's written about a coal town in Kentucky rather than West Virginia, I'm reminded of Patty Loveless' lyric, "You'll never leave Harlan alive.") It seems a sharp contrast from, "Start spreading the news . . . I want to be a part of it - New York, New York!" (And really, can anyone imagine that line ending with "Beckley, West Virginia"?)
All of us hillbillies seem to share that melancholy. We're here wishing things were better, or we are somewhere else wishing we could come home.
The sentiment is even expressed in one of the latter verses of our state song:
Oh the West Virginia hills, where my childhood hours were passed,
Where I often wandered lonely and the future tried to cast;
Many are our visions bright, which the future ne'er fulfills;
But how sunny were my daydreams on those West Virginia hills.
I wonder how many of us had just this experience when we were young, imagining something better and brighter than our families had known here, only to realize much later that those dreams were not to be realized.
And so the writer of that song says:
Oh, the West Virginia hills, I must bid you now adieu,
In my home beyond the mountains I shall ever dream of you . . .
For all of you who have shared that dream, I hope it is a sweet one, wherever you are having it.
(For a bone-chilling version of the West Virginia state song that captures the wistfulness of the lyric, I'd recommend this version by the Missing Person Soup Kitchen Gospel Quartet.)
