It’s Christmas Day, and I am writing this while listening to various covers of John Denver’s Country Roads, something that has never crossed my mind to do before.
I owe it all to Bryan, Shelby, Portia, and Ford. They went to Louisville to celebrate Christmas. On the surface, it made a lot of sense—to them, at least. I mean, who wants to travel with two kids under four during the week of Christmas. As Bryan is from Louisville and his family still lives there, they had a great reason to go. Pam and I knew it was the right thing, but it put a slight damper on our Christmas activities, not that we do that much on Christmas anyway. But still….
Pam and Kim decided that since we would not be with Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford on Christmas Eve, I should make a Christmas Eve brisket, leaving us leftovers for dinner on Christmas Day, thereby eliminating the need for us to scour the city for a non-Chinese restaurant that would be open. Not that we do not like Chinese food, we do, but we had a lot of it last weekend, making it out of the question this week.
Having finished night one of the brisket, thankfully sans latkes, which I am still digesting after the last time I made them a couple of years ago, Pam and I settled down to watch Glass Onion on Netflix. I cannot say I was thrilled, but I agreed to watch it. It was reasonably amusing and somewhat entertaining. I loved the whole malapropism theme, as it reminded me of Shelby, who was the queen of them when she was younger. The other thing I enjoyed was the soundtrack, which was great.
About halfway into the movie, my subconscious began to register a tune that was, at least for me, out of place with the lyrics. Suddenly, I stopped listening to the dialog and focused on the song, which was Country Roads, yet it wasn’t. The chords and notes were all there. The lyrics were, well, off. I was captivated, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to get a handle on it. Clearly, it was a cover with altered lyrics, but not in the sense that Weird Al turned a cover into a parody. This was a real song, just different, and it was good.
Though I never told my friends and would have lost several fingernails before I admitted it, I have always been a John Denver fan, even before he was popular, even before he released Country Roads, even when I was in high school. For a kid from West LA, this is quite an admission. In an era when it was cool to spend hours eroding the grooves on vinyl albums like Surrealistic Pillow, Woodstock, Live at Fillmore East, I was content to idle my post high school day afternoons away by myself listening to Aerie, the album John Denver released prior to Poems, Prayers & Promises, the album that featured Country Roads. I did not know it then, besides the phrase was not coined yet, but John Denver was one of my guilty pleasures, albeit a sub rosa one.
Which is a long, winding way for me to get back to Country Roads. Thanks to Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford, I found myself with not much to do today. So out of the blue I googled the Glass Onion soundtrack. I noted that the song that fascinated me was sung by Toots & the Maytals, a long-lived Reggae group of which I had never heard. I listened to their cover more than once. It turns out that they recorded their version of it in 1972, soon after John Dever’s release. Who knew. I didn’t, but I do now.
Not being content to leave it at that, I started listening to too many, if you ask Pam, one would have been too many, covers of Country Roads, a song that has been covered way more times than I would have suspected. It turns out that it is an amazing song to cover. Its simplicity and heartfelt lyrics lend itself to a wide range of artists. I played several of the covers, beginning with the versions by Loretta Lynn and Olivia Newton-John and a gaggle of versions by no-name artists before listening to Brandi Carlile’s 2021 version, a stripped-down, soulful rendition which highlights the purity of her voice. It was the best one I heard.
So here I sit writing this, enjoying some great music and feeling quite sure that I will be doing something similar on Christmas Days to come. I just need Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford to go back to Louisville.
Merry Christmas.