As 2022 comes to a close, many of us can't help but hope that the New Year will bring more sunshine on our shoulders, to borrow imagery from a singer/songwriter who would have turned 79 this week. Although christened Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., the world knew him as John Denver. While starring in movies, making television specials, and embracing numerous causes, John Denver cheered millions of people with his happy music.
As I wrote in this space several years ago, if you were around in the 1970s, it's easy to close your eyes and recall his boyish face, long blond locks, granny glasses, and phrases such as "Far out!" which John Denver tossed about without being the least bit self-conscious. He died too young, at 53, in an experimental airplane he was piloting over the Pacific Ocean. Two and a half decades later, his tunes still hum around in our heads.
Those songs range from the lyrical "Poems, Prayers, and Promises," which he sang on screen with the Muppets, to a love ballad called "Annie's Song."
His fame first took flight with "Take Me Home, Country Roads," the unofficial West Virginia state song. It migrated with him out West with "Rocky Mountain High," an ode to Colorado adopted by the legislature as its own. After the state Senate listened to the song, Republican lawmaker Steve Ward gushed, "If I had any hair, I'd part it in the middle and say, ‘Far out!'"
It was a nice moment, but the songwriter's life wasn't always easy.
The existence of a Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. implied the existence of a Henry John Deutschendorf Sr., and that man's difficult relationship with his sons helped produce the tension in John Denver's life that informed his art.
The Oklahoma-born oldest of 12 children, the senior Deutschendorf enlisted in the Army Air Corps at 20. He proved himself such a skilled pilot that he spent most of World War II as a flight instructor on B-17s and B-29s. When he retired as an Air Force colonel in 1966, "Dutch" Deutschendorf could boast an Air Medal, a Distinguished Flying Cross, and air speed records while test-flying the B-58 Hustler. But he could not claim to have a close relationship with his younger son.
In John Denver's biography, Col. Deutschendorf comes across like "The Great Santini." In his son's telling, the decorated flier was a hard-drinking and emotionally remote man. Junior was a sensitive boy whose preferred activity was strumming on the acoustic guitar given him by his maternal grandmother at age 11. Many of John Denver's most evocative songs were about going home, a concept he wrestled with all his life. The nomadic military life didn't suit him; and in his own family life Denver demanded an intensity he felt was missing in his childhood.
His first wife, Annie Martell (the woman of "Annie's Song"), came to learn that John was acting out this friction from his childhood. He loved his adopted home state of Colorado and their house in Aspen, but in the 1970s he was rarely there. Instead, he was constantly touring, acting, and involving himself in various causes.
Being on the road so often, with its expected temptations, took its toll on his personal life, even as it fueled his art. "Leaving on a Jet Plane," a song he wrote and sang -- and let many others sing -- became an anthem to young American boys heading for Vietnam and the loved ones left behind. His songs were often adapted in this way. In the 1970s, the Baltimore Orioles adopted Denver's version of "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" as their 7th-inning-stretch song; "Rocky Mountain High" beckoned a generation of quality-of-life pilgrims to the rapidly growing states straddling the Continental Divide. "Calypso" was a song he wrote for his friend Jacques Cousteau. John Denver had many such friends, ranging from Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, to President Jimmy Carter.
When Denver died, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary -- a group whose only No. 1 hit was their interpretation of "Leaving on a Jet Plane" -- called him "the Jimmy Stewart of folk music." Roger Ebert made the same comparison in his 1977 review of the unlikely Carl Reiner hit "Oh, God!"
In that under-appreciated film, Denver was cast as Jerry Landers, an unpretentious supermarket assistant manager whom God (played by George Burns) has decided to contact. "John Denver," wrote Ebert, "is well-cast: sincere, believable, with that face so open and goofy."
Yes, that was one side of him. The other side was that of an intensely serious man, a seeker. In 1976, when his career was at its peak, he had a rapprochement with his father, who -- fatefully, as it would turn out -- taught him to fly. In 1982, the year John Denver lost his father as well as his first marriage, he began devoting himself more earnestly to that hobby.
When he died in 1997, the talented musician left behind three children, a brother, two ex-wives, and a grieving mother. His mom wept at his funeral as she walked outside of Faith Presbyterian Church in Aurora, Colo., to the mournful wail of a bagpipe. The funeral was held on the kind of brilliantly blue-skied Colorado day that her son liked to sing about. That morning, his music filled the church, packed with 1,000 mourners, and was piped outside to another 1,000 who couldn't get in.
One of the songs played that day was an ode John Denver wrote to his father, "On the Wings of a Dream," with its haunting first line: "Yesterday I had a dream about dying, about laying to rest and then flying." Its ending is even more poignant: "Why is it thus we are here and so soon we are gone?"
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.