Culture
‘John Denver: Country Boy’ to Air on WOUB-TV Tonight, Monday
By: Emily Votaw
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Over the course of his career, John Denver (birth name Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.) released a slew of hit songs that bridged the oft-wide gap between popular and entirely acoustic music. Denver was also one of the first musicians to put together benefit concerts to raise funds for political and humanitarian causes, such as worldwide hunger awareness and environmental preservation efforts.
2017 marks the 20-year anniversary of his untimely death at the age of 53, when he fatally crashed one of his own airplanes. Tonight, WOUB-TV will broadcast the 2015 PBS documentary John Denver: Country Boy, which explores the life of the internationally beloved singer.
“In the early ‘60s, it wasn’t so uncommon for folk groups like the Kingston Trio to be on the Top Ten charts, but by the time you got to the later ‘60s and ‘70s, that wasn’t the case, unless you want call James Taylor ‘folk,’ which he kind of was; or call Joni Mitchell ‘folk,’ which she kind of was,” said Larry Groce, one of the founders of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s internationally distributed Mountain Stage. “I really tip my hat to John Denver because he stayed with acoustic music all of his career and he really made it work, he had an enormous audience for it.”
Groce interacted with Denver only once, in 1985, shortly following the enormous flooding that devastated West Virginia that year. Groce was a part of a joint effort between Mountain Stage and West Virginia’s Mountaineers Sports Network to put together a statewide telethon to raise funds for those affected by the flooding.
“We recruited some people who had been on Mountain Stage to come out, two of which were Bill Danoff and his wife Taffy Nivert, who wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” with Denver. Bill asked Denver if he would come out for the telethon, and he did,” said Groce, who said that Denver flew himself in for the day to perform the global smash-hit “Country Roads” alongside the rest of the congregated musicians during the telethon.
“It was a very nice thing for him to do, we didn’t pay him anything,” said Groce. “Denver is an interesting character because he really did break into the world of the Top Ten, and that’s quite an accomplishment, whether you like his music or not.”
John Denver: Country Boy will air tonight at 8 p.m. on WOUB-TV and again on March 13 at 11:30 p.m.
