China's love affair with "Country Roads Take Me Home"

boing
21

The melancholy feeling of being far from where you grew up, especially if you grew up rural, is universal.

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22

Yes, that’s especially true around Chinese New Years time in China when millions of people are trying to get back home to be with their families.

23

I think that’s a big part of it, along with the fact that most the chorus (which is what most people will be singing) is 3-4 syllables sung slowly, followed by a pause, followed by another 3-4 syllables. It’s also easy to remember the tune, even if you’re really drunk (which seems to be the case in Chinese karaeoke). If the words are on the screen for you to read, even quite a poor second language English speaker should be able to manage it. My students in China were a bit more advanced learners, so they preferred “Sexy and I know it”

24

Uh, curious from a Western perspective. You don’t find it even a little curious that a song about fucking West Virgina (of all places) is big in China? Do you know any Chinese songs that get sung on American Idol about how awesome Qinghai Province is? No, of course not, but I would be willing to forgive someone from China who would find it “curious” if there was one and want to know the origins.

You do realize that it is okay be a little bit fascinated and curious about other cultures and their quirks, right? There is a vast gulf between finding a quirk in a culture interesting and worth exploring, and destructive cultural fetishism. Frankly, even if there was no vast yawning gulf that you appear to have missed, I would prefer people be fascinated with each other than trying to dehumanize and murder each other.

Dial back the sensitivity meter back down below 11. It is curious. Get over it.

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25

Saw this film at the only anime convention I visited. In Voronezh, Russia. Those were the days…

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26

John Denver really does seem to be revered all over the world. An almost literal translation serenading the beauty of the Alps instead of Virgina has become a modern folk tune here in Slovenia with a large portion of people not knowing about the Denver original at all.

Aleksander Mežek - Siva pot (“Grey Road”)

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27

You are corect. It was a joke. Nobody here actually thinks otherwise.

28

The simple reason he got West Virginia geography wrong is that when he wrote the song, John Denver hadn’t actually been to West Virginia yet. And like Take Me Out to the Ballpark, it captured a feeling so well it has become a theme song.

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29

The Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge clip the corner of WV, so they technically weren’t wrong. They sure didn’t hit on anything a West Virginian would be homesick for. Setting aside fitting the tune, which two things would you put in there?

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30

Mostly it was written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, later in the Starland Vocal Band (“Afternoon Delight”) They lived in DC when they wrote it. Denver tweaked it with them after he bought it. None of them had been in WV at the time, but the road that inspired it was in Maryland. Missed it by that much.

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31

I live in a town with an enormous Asian immigrant population, and last year at a local town festival I got to see an elderly (mostly East Asian) ladies chorus singing “Sweet Home, Alabama”.

It was sort of amazing. Wish I had a video.

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32

Ah - this takes me back. Parents were all into John Denver, The Mamas and the Papas, and Neil Diamond when I was little. Country Road Take Me Home, Thank God I’m a Country Boy, Sweet Caroline, and Puff the Magic Dragon were staples.
I still, to this day, get teary eyed listening to Puff.

Everyone needs a hobby.

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33

I just came here to say that that clip from the Chinese American Idol was so fun and sweet. Thanks for the share.

34

I do agree with you, but the first thing that popped into my mind – as someone who has studied Chinese and Japanese in the past – is that “West Virginia”, “Shenandoah River”, and “country roads” are actually very difficult phrases for them to pronounce. Maybe that’s the allure.

35

30 years ago I was in Japan, where I attended a party. The entertainment was a rock band playing American hits, even though none of the members spoke English. They had memorized the sounds, but filtered through their own cultural bias, so they sang passionately about a place called “Ves Gazinia.”

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No, it would be a song.

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And probably more common in current day China than current day America.

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If the original name was easy to pronounce, the European settlers wouldn’t have called it “Shenandoah” in the first place!

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39

During one summer a friend of mine taught these 6 week immersion language courses, where a wide variety of Japanese folks would come over and visit and work on English. It was half vacation/half course, because they would take the students out to tourist spots every weekend. The instructors would choose a song for the people in their course to learn, and one of the instructors played folk guitar and chose “Country Roads”. Apparently, by the end of week 6 they all understand the song and are bawling their eyes out as they sing it over nostalgia, memories, new friends, and whatnot.

It’s pretty great.

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40

I don’t think this is unique to China, it’s more unique to karaoke culture. I lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for a year, and there was a weekly karaoke night at one of the local pubs, and this song got sung every single time. It’s a song that easy to sing, the lyrics are easy to remember, and it’s sentimentality is based on a universal theme (homesickness), therefore, it’s popular everywhere.

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