By Mike Rosso
In our October 2012 issue, #223, we wrote about Colorado’s first official state song “Where the Columbines Grow” by A.J. Fynn, which was adopted in 1915 by the General Assembly.
In March of 2007, “Rocky Mountain High,” by singer songwriter John Denver, was named the second official state song by the Colorado State Assembly.
Rocky Mountain High, which rose to number nine on the U.S. top 100 charts forty years ago in 1973, was not without controversy. Some interpreted the lyrics as promoting drug use. In fact, the year it was released, the Federal Communications Commission censored the song in some markets due to the “high” reference found in the lyrics. A few radio stations self-censored the song, not playing it until Denver publicly declared that the word “high” referred to the sense of peace he found in the Rocky Mountains after moving to Aspen in the late 1960s.
Denver even testified about the song lyrics in 1985 before Congress in the Parents Music Resource Center hearings, founded by Tipper Gore, held with the intent of increasing parental control of children’s access to pop music considered violent, sexual or drug-promoting, which led to a rating system for commercial music still in place today.
John Denver was named Poet Laureate of Colorado in 1974 by then-governor John David Vanderhoof. He cofounded The Hunger Project and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve on the President’s Commission on World Hunger. Denver also cofounded the Windstar Foundation, an environmental education and humanitarian organization which operated until 2012. Denver was a big fan of flying and after passing a rigorous NASA physical exam, he became a finalist for the first citizen’s trip on the Space Shuttle in 1986. In 1996 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2011 he became the first inductee into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. A ski run at the Snowmass ski resort near Aspen is named for his well-known song.
Denver died in 1997 at the age of 53 when his Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Pacific Grove, California.
Where the Columbines grow? I gotta hear that.