Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lessons from Take Me Home, Country Roads: Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Lessons from Take Me Home, Country Roads: Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Morris, Sarah L.

Paperback

General ReferenceGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesWorld Music

ISBN10: 1959000543
ISBN13: 9781959000549
Publisher: West Virginia University Press
Published: Oct 1 2025
Pages: 262
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
You may have heard it at a football game, in an advertisement, or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand, at Oktoberfest in Belgium, or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays, the song Take Me Home, Country Roads is ubiquitous, unmistakable, universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver in 1971, the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences, carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages.

This book examines Country Roads as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining Country Roads as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, this work untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. Take Me Home, Country Roads, while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.

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