It has been a long time, nearly 30 years, since we lost John Denver. Whether you loved him or hated him, I am who I am now in large part because of him and his music’s influence on me.
When he arrived on the scene with Rocky Mountain High, around 1972 or ’73, I was a gawky, awkward 14year-old freshman. I had just lost my oldest older brother and was at drift.
That song, though, said a lot of what I was thinking, if I could have thought cognitively at that stage. It entered my brain, my soul, and rumbled around in there with Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan.
Its lyrics made it ok to feel like nature was my friend, maybe my only friend. The subjects it touched on were the ideas coming alive in me, even if I fully missed the references to getting high.
Suddenly, with the click of a radio dial, preferring to be in the woods as a non-hunter was acceptable, maybe even a little cool. Finding solace in nature elevated me from being a geek who had actually read ‘On Walden Pond’ to being a fan of the folk/pop music scene.
As the hits kept coming, I learned to be comfortable in my own skin, at home with loving home. And if that home was agriculturally-based, so much the better. It was out there, man, far out.
Without the backup that Denver and those other poets gave me, there is no telling whether I would have had the stiff spine required to stay true to what mattered to me, to become a wordsmith whose one mission has been – for all those years since RMH- has been to be understood when I paint a verbal landscape.
I was deeply saddened when John crashed his plane and died. It was like a part of my life was lost, too.
But what made me the saddest was one of his friends recounting that Denver had begun to think he was obsolete, of no account, that he had never made a difference with his music.
If we can talk to one another when I get to Glory, I hope I get the chance to pull him aside and show him some clips from the newspapers where I have worked, the awards they won, just to prove he did make a difference, that he did shape lives with his work. Just like I hope I have shaped some lives with mine.