Rocky Mountain High

“Rocky Mountain High” is a folk rock song written by John Denver and Mike Taylor and is one of the two official state songs of Colorado. Recorded by Denver in 1972 it is the title track of the 1972 album Rocky Mountain High and rose to No. 9 on the US Hot 100 in 1973. Denver told concert audiences in the mid-1970s that the song took him an unusually long nine months to write. On April 10, 2017, the record was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales exceeding 500,000 digital downloads. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
“Rocky Mountain High” was primarily inspired by John Denver’s move to Aspen, Colorado, three years before its writing and by his love for the state. The seventh stanza makes reference to the destruction of the mountains’ beauty by commercial tourism. The song was considered a major piece of 1970’s pop culture and became a well-associated piece of Colorado history. The song briefly became controversial that year[when?] when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission was permitted by a legal ruling to censor music deemed to promote drug abuse[citation needed]. Numerous radio stations cautiously banned it[citation needed] until Denver publicly explained that the “high” was his innocent description of the sense of peace he found in the Rockies. In 1985, Denver testified before Congress in the Parents Music Resource Center hearings about his experience: This was obviously done by people who had never seen or been to the Rocky Mountains, and also had never experienced the elation, celebration of life or the joy in living that one feels when he observes something as wondrous as the Perseid meteor shower on a moonless, cloudless night, when there are so many stars that you have a shadow from the starlight, and you are out camping with your friends, your best friends, and introducing them to one of nature’s most spectacular light shows for the first time. Cash Box said that the song “sparkles with sincerity and beautiful lyrical images.”