RCA 0374
Producer: Milton Okun
Track listing: Take Me Home, Country Roads Follow Me / Starwood in Aspen For Baby (For Bobbie) / Rhymes and Reasons / Leaving on a Jet Plane / The Eagle and the Hawk / Sunshine on My Shoulders / Goodbye Again / Poems, Prayers and Promises / Rocky Mountain High
March 30, 1974
3 weeks (nonconsecutive)
It may have been a bit presumptuous for John Denver to collect the best songs from his first six albums for a compilation called John Denver’s Greatest Hits. By November 1973, when the album was released, Denver had only had two top 10 hits: “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” his first chart single, which climbed to number two in August 1971, and “Rocky Mountain High,” which had reached number nine in March 1973.
Denver’s earliest success came as a songwriter. Peter, Paul & Mary scored a Number One hit in December 1969 with their interpretation of Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Denver’s version of the song appeared on his first solo album, Rhymes and Reasons. For Greatest Hits, he opted to re-record some of the early tracks, such as “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Rhymes and Reasons.”
“By the time we did Greatest Hits, I had my own band,” says Denver. “On those original recordings, I didn’t have a band, I was just playing with session players.”
The singer-songwriter felt strongly about including “Rhymes and Reasons” on Greatest Hits, even though the song was not a hit. “It’s one of my favorite songs, because it speaks to people about where we are in the world and where we are going.”
Although Denver had only scored a few legitimate hits, he had found a significant audience with his feel-good songs about the virtues of home and nature, such as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Rocky Mountain High.” Says Denver, “I’m the kind of person who looks on the bright side, and people can relate to that. ‘Country Roads’ is not so much about West Virginia — it’s about going home, and a lot of people have memories about that sort of thing.”
A number of factors helped propel Greatest Hits to the top of the charts. For one, Denver had begun to develop a high profile on television. “I had appeared on the Tom Jones Show, The Smothers Brothers show, and as a guest on Bob Hope, and all that exposure helped create an audience for me,” he says.
Adding to Denver’s momentum was the release of “Sunshine on My Shoulders” as a single. The track had first appeared on the 1971 album Poems, Prayers and Promises. “We knew that it was getting a whole lot of airplay up in the Northwest, so RCA decided to release it as a single,” Denver recalls.
At approximately the same time, NBC broadcast a television movie about a young woman who was dying of leukemia, using the song as its theme. “All of those things kind of happened at once,” Denver says. “They were all mutually supportive.”
As “Sunshine on My Shoulders” was burning up the Hot 100, Greatest Hits climbed up the Top LP’s & Tapes chart. On March 30, both the single and album hit the summit simultaneously. Denver had truly reached a “Rocky Mountain High.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of March 30, 1974
1. John Denver’s Greatest Hits, John Denver
2. Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell
3. Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield
4. The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand
5. Band on the Run, Paul McCartney & Wings