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Country Roads Take Me Home
The 1971 John Denver hit is the most popular song at the Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany — still
This year will be my 20th Oktoberfest in a row. The two years missed due to the COVID-19 pandemic don’t count, of course.
I absolutely love this event and even if with each passing year the amount of beer I consume gets less, as I tell people, “It’s not about the beer, it’s about the music.” The overall mood is intoxicating — and, yes, the beer helps with that.
If you have ever been there, then you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t been there, please don’t watch that stupid Hollywood movie Beerfest and think that you have an idea of what it is like. That movie was horrible, by the way, and nothing like the real Oktoberfest.
As an American, the greatest surprise for me in 1998 — my first time — and I see the look appear year after on the faces of other “newbie Americans,” is that John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” is the most popular song of the two-centuries-old folk festival.
Almost heaven
As the G-chord transitions to the Em-chords, imagine 10,000 people singing in unison “Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.” It is in many ways a life-changing moment.
Infecting the soul, it makes every American present think for one second, “Wow, what a goddamn cool country we have.”
“Life is old there, older than the treeees,” we continue, swaying first left then right, thousands stand on the very same benches upon which seconds before we were sitting. (Standing on top of the tables is a major faux pas, so if you manage to get to Munich this year, please don’t do that.)
The bandstand is usually located right in the center of the massive “tent,” which is really a large wooden hangar-like structure built just for the 16-day event. Song after song spills out into the thousands-strong crowd as liter-sized, ice-cold beers are sipped, and often regrettably guzzled, by Bavarian-clothes-wearing revelers.
Every non-German tourist nowadays seems to be wearing the traditional Bavarian and Tirolean garb made up of short leather pants for guys and colorful…
