Take Me Home, Country Roads
'It's a song about togetherness, belonging, homesickness, the immigrant experience and the hold that the landscape of your 'home place' can have on you.'
"Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong"
Written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert with and for their friend John Denver, the song went on to be covered by Ray Charles, Toots and the Maytals, Olivia Newton John and many more. A song about the longing for home and the desire to be back with the people you love, 'Country Roads' has become one of the official state songs of West Virginia but it also speaks to people from around the world and across political divides. It's a song about togetherness, belonging, homesickness, the immigrant experience and the hold that the landscape of your 'home place' can have on you.
Featuring contributions from Bill Danoff, Sarah Morris, Jason Jeong, Ngozi Fulani, Lloyd Bradley and Alison Wells. And from Molly Sarlé, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath of the band Mountain Man.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio in Bristol
Photo by nasim dadfar on Unsplash
Road Building
Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced his support for taking in refugees who have supported the U.S. military in Afghanistan, tweeting that his state has a “responsibility to these heroes & their families.” I agree with my governor, and am so glad that friends in the interfaith community are playing a role in resettlement.
Memory plays an extremely important role in process theology. The idea is that we are always in process, slightly new at every moment, but that we are shaped by memories from the past that are the building blocks of the present. Among those memories, for so many of us, is a place called home. A place we love and to which we belong. Our memory is like a country road, leading us to the place in our heart, even if we cannot return in physical space.
I think of the tens of thousands of refugees in world today who carry within their own hearts an arduous country road that leads back home. Their need is to integrate this memory with a new life and move forward with courage, while never losing their roots. In the spiritual alphabet, “c” is for connection and “q” is for questing. Our task, as friends of refugees, is to honor their country roads and help them with the quest. It is to take the journey with them. It is to build new roads while never forgetting the roads they've travelled and the homes they love.
- Jay McDaniel, August 28, 2021
Memory plays an extremely important role in process theology. The idea is that we are always in process, slightly new at every moment, but that we are shaped by memories from the past that are the building blocks of the present. Among those memories, for so many of us, is a place called home. A place we love and to which we belong. Our memory is like a country road, leading us to the place in our heart, even if we cannot return in physical space.
I think of the tens of thousands of refugees in world today who carry within their own hearts an arduous country road that leads back home. Their need is to integrate this memory with a new life and move forward with courage, while never losing their roots. In the spiritual alphabet, “c” is for connection and “q” is for questing. Our task, as friends of refugees, is to honor their country roads and help them with the quest. It is to take the journey with them. It is to build new roads while never forgetting the roads they've travelled and the homes they love.
- Jay McDaniel, August 28, 2021
Co-Longing
"Don Don" and Jay McDaniel on the Boardwalk, Pacific Beach
"Don Don" and I visited almost every day while I was in Pacific Beach; he was a street musician on the boardwalk. We sang lots of songs together: Gloria, House of the Rising Son, Louie Louie, I Saw Her Standing There. But the one that meant the most to Don Don and to me was Take Me Home, Country Roads. I don’t have a recording of it, but I remember the feeling. The song reminded Don Don of his home far away, where he'd come from, and it reminded me of a place I love, too. In the spiritual alphabet, “c” is for connection. We human beings - we are "together" in so many ways. We co-long for a home place in our imaginations: that place where we are safe and warm and together.