Few genres of music capture the heart of America like country music can. For decades, country music has paid homage to the American landscape, and all of its beauty. We picked four country songs that sound like love letters to the great American landscape.
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1. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by John Denver
John Denver first released "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in 1971. More than 50 years later, the song still takes the listener to wherever home is to them. Ironically, though Denver is from New Mexico, "Take Me Home, Country Roads" cites West Virginia as his home at the time.
"Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong / West Virginia, mountain mama / Take me home, country roads," Denver sings. Denver wrote the song with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, after the three were in a car accident.
"We were gonna go back to their house and jam. We were in a car accident, and my thumb was broken," Denver recalls (via American Songwriter). "I went to the hospital to have a splint put on. And by then, I was wired after a car wreck. So we went over to their house, and in the early hours of the morning."
The two played what they had started of "Take Me Home, Country Roads," with Denver helping them finish it.
"That morning, we finished writing that song," he adds. "And I said, 'We've got to record this on the next album, which was Poems, Prayers, and Promises."
2. "God Bless The USA" by Lee Greenwood
Few songs paint such a vivid picture as Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA." Released in 1984, the song is still a staple at virtually every patriotic event, more than 40 years later.
"God Bless The USA" says in part, "From the lakes of Minnesota, to the hills of Tennessee / Across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea / From Detroit down to Houston and New York to L.A. / Well, there's pride in every American heart / And it's time we stand and say That I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free."
But when Greenwood wrote "God Bless The USA," he had no idea how much America would still rally around the song, so many decades later. For Greenwood, it was just a way to pay tribute to the country he dearly loved.
"I wanted to write it my whole life," he tells The Boot. "When I got to that point, we were doing 300 days a year on the road. And, we were on our fourth or fifth album on MCA. I called my producer, and I said, 'I have a need to do this. I've always wanted to write a song about America.' And I said, 'We just need to be more united.'"
3. "Fishin' In The Dark" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
"Fishin' In The Dark" was released by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1987. Written by Wendy Waldman and Jim Photoglo, neither the writers nor the band likely envisioned the song would still be covered by countless country artists in the last almost 40 years, likely due in large part to the song's stunning imagery.
"Lazy yellow moon comin' up tonight / Shinin' through the trees," the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band sings. "The crickets are singin' and lightning bugs are floatin' on the breeze / Baby, get ready / Across the field where the creek turns back / By the old stump row / I'm gonna take you to a special place that nobody knows / Baby, get ready."
"Back in the '80s, they played our songs a lot on country radio, and that was our biggest hit," Hanna says (via HuffPost). "It was the No. 1 single back in 1987. And then with the dawn of the digital age, it was a slow process getting our record companies to put our music up on iTunes because it was stuff that we cut some time ago. ... Apparently, people keep responding to the song because we now have a gold digital single, which we think is really cool. We have half a million downloads for the song, which we think is great for a bunch of old geezers like us."
4. "Red Dirt Road" by Brooks & Dunn
Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn wrote "Red Dirt Road" together, making it the title track of their eighth studio album. The duo liked the song so much, they included it on their 2019 Reboot album, this time joined by then-newcomer, Cody Johnson.
There might not be a country song that paints more of a love letter to the American landscape than "Red Dirt Road." The song begins with "I was raised off of Rural Route 3 / Out past where the blacktop ends / We'd walk to church on Sunday morning / Race barefoot back to Johnson's fence / That's where I first saw Mary / On that roadside, pickin' blackberries / That summer, I turned a corner in my soul / Down that red dirt road."
"It was one of the few times that we really got serious about where we came from," Brooks says (via The Boot). "And started talking about our grandparents and all that kind of good stuff."
"We just started talking about, 'Remember how red that dirt was?'" Dunn adds. "And we said, 'Man, we've gotta call our album that.' And it was like, 'Cool. We've probably gotta write a song then, too.'"
