Karen Tongson, a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters, told me that the music of soft-rock artists such as Denver and Karen Carpenter gained massive followings because of the availability of Armed Forces Radio (now called the American Forces Network) over decades in regions with a significant U.S. cultural influence in other parts of the continent. While Denvermania spread across China, the artist was seen as a deliberate tool for U.S. At a time when the Communist Party’s anti-American policies still colored daily life, Denver’s music was among the first and most popular pieces of American pop culture to be widely disseminated across the nation. Denver himself proclaimed that “the Chinese are more familiar with me than with any other Western artist.” Although his trip stalled, reportedly because of concerns over venue location and crowd control, in 1992, Denver embarked on a multicity tour of the country. In 1985, Denver was invited to be one of the first Western artists to tour modern China, with his performances set to broadcast on state-controlled TV networks. For this historic summit, President Jimmy Carter hosted festivities at the Kennedy Center, featuring the likes of the Joffrey Ballet, the Harlem Globetrotters (a seemingly obligatory fixture of geopolitical statesmanship), and John Denver.Ĭarter’s idea of an unforgettable night must have left an impression on the Chinese delegation. In 1979, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping made the first diplomatic trip to Washington by a sitting leader of China since World War II. After the death of Mao Zedong, a new era of U.S.-China detente began. Thus, a song drunkenly belted out at West Virginia University tailgates was transmuted into an aspirational, mythological hymn.ĭenver was perhaps an unlikely candidate for stardom in Asia, but his musical career intertwined with a time of rapid transformation on the continent. Many listeners encountered in the pastoral scenes of Denver’s lyrics a landscape upon which they could project pure fantasies of an ascendant United States. military influence, domestic political upheaval, and increased outbound migration, Denver’s song about reminiscence and homecoming found an audience grappling with deep cultural and demographic change. Introduced to Asia during a period of U.S. Although the survey’s sample was small, its findings were, as Blank and Rupke write, a testament to the song’s enduring relevance as a “powerful cultural symbol.” In a 2009 paper, the sociologists Grant Blank and Heidi Netz Rupke published an informal survey of college classrooms in Western China that found that “Country Roads” was the most popular American song among the students. It’s as classically American as a McDonald’s apple pie an ode to an uncomplicated vision of the United States.īut over the past half century, Denver’s Appalachian anthem has also lodged in the hearts of many families in Asia, thousands of miles away from the Blue Ridge Mountains. In its terse descriptions of bucolic West Virginia-“Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze”-the gentle folk tune can conjure nostalgia for a place you’ve never visited and a life you’ve never lived. A fixture of saccharine Super Bowl commercials and orthodontists’ waiting rooms across the country, John Denver’s platinum record “Take Me Home, Country Roads” turned 50 years old last month.
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