Country Roads and Summer Nights Edition Part 1
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These days, country and pop acts regularly invade each other’s territory. But in Nashville during the 1970s, “crossover” was a dirty word. Then came two rising stars who offered up a new hybrid of Americana-style pop.
John Denver infused his folk balladry with homespun lyrics about country roads and wide-open skies. Olivia Newton-John sang over twangy melodies that belied her British-Australian roots. Both faced backlash—especially when they started topping the country and pop charts simultaneously and winning prizes that used to go to Nashville legends.
Eventually, both artists outgrew country music. Denver became a ubiquitous entertainer and beloved Muppet wingman. Newton-John dazzled in the film Grease, then reinvented herself as a leather-clad siren unafraid to get physical.
Join Chris Molanphy as he traces the parallel rise of two country-pop titans from the Rocky Mountains to Xanadu.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. Part two will |
| 0:06.9 | arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at |
| 0:11.9 | once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's |
| 0:19.0 | acclaimed journalism and podcasts. just go to slate.com |
| 0:23.6 | slash Hit Parade Plus. You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. |
| 0:30.9 | Plus, Hit Parade The Bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our |
| 0:37.3 | episode topics, and pop chart trivia. |
| 0:40.1 | Once again, to join, that's slate.com slash hit parade plus. |
| 0:45.5 | Thanks, and now please enjoy part one of this hit parade episode. |
| 1:03.0 | Almost 10. episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits |
| 1:10.1 | from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, |
| 1:13.2 | chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On today's show, |
| 1:20.6 | 55 years ago, in the winter of 1971, singer-songwriter John Denver recorded a song that would change the trajectory of his |
| 1:32.1 | career. In the 1960s, Denver had been a rising star in the world of folk music. He'd even written a |
| 1:41.3 | song that gave folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, a number one hit. |
| 1:46.9 | But this 1971 song moved him closer to the sound of country music. |
| 1:54.5 | It had the word country right in the title. |
| 2:25.0 | Take me home to the place. Take me home, country roads turned out to be a pop smash, eventually climbing to number two on Billboard's Hot 100 in the summer of 71. |
| 2:30.2 | It also cracked the country charts, but just barely. |
| 2:41.8 | Surprisingly, one of the most celebrated country songs of the 20th century only got as high as number 50 on hot country singles. The country audience wasn't all that interested. |
| 2:50.0 | Two years later, take Me Home Country Roads was recorded by another up-and-coming vocalist, |
| 3:00.3 | a pop singer raised in Melbourne, Australia, and her version, improbably, was on an album that reached number one on the American |
... |
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