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Bill Danoff has watched the scene a couple of times now and can't help but chuckle: a group of American soccer players decades younger than him, standing shoulder to shoulder after World Cup games, singing and swaying to a song he helped write more than a half-century ago, a stadium full of emotional supporters belting back at them from the stands.
He's tickled.
"Boy, the song has just been everywhere," Danoff, who wrote "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with country legend John Denver, said last week from his home in Washington. "I think it's just terrific. Who would've thought, this thing that came out of a dirty, old hippie apartment in Georgetown would be inspiring a soccer team? We sure didn't."
Danoff, 79, had seen the song travel the world: appearing in a Japanese movie, in an Australian commercial, at virtually every sporting event in West Virginia and plenty elsewhere. But after the first U.S. soccer game of this tournament, his phone started to ping and his inbox filled.
They're playing your song.
As the United States prepares to face Belgium on Monday night in Seattle in the World Cup's round of 16, Denver's 1971 hit has become the unexpected soundtrack of the Americans' World Cup journey.
The Americans did not set out to create a tradition. Before the tournament, FIFA asked teams to submit a list of songs to play for warm-ups, goals and victories. U.S. Soccer officials consulted with players and others, looking for songs that felt recognizably American and could work as crowd sing-alongs. The list included Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" and "Country Roads."
With "Sweet Caroline" already claimed by England, the Americans landed on "Country Roads." After each game, the players walk toward their supporters, line up and face the crowd as the familiar opening notes pour through the stadium speakers. A massive sing-along ensues.
"I can't explain - it just gives you chills," U.S. star Christian Pulisic said.
The song is blasted outside the stadium, from car radios and at watch parties. If it's hokey - it's so hokey - no one appears bothered.
There's no reason "Country Roads" should belong to this team. U.S. Coach Mauricio Pochettino is Argentine. The team has players born in other countries and raised abroad. No one is from West Virginia.
But, in Danoff's telling, maybe that is also why the song works.
"Country Roads" is not especially interested in telling people what kind of country America is supposed to be. It does not wave a flag. It does not thump its chest. It does not traffic in political language or patriotic tropes. It is gentler than that, and perhaps more durable: a song about home, memory and belonging.
"It's not ideological," Danoff said. "It's not political. It's just a nice song to sing."
In that simplicity, the U.S. team has found something unexpectedly binding: a song familiar enough for everyone to know, loose enough for everyone to claim.
"These are my brothers," U.S. defender Chris Richards said after one win. "All of us know that part of being American is knowing ‘Country Roads,' so we were all singing it together."
That may be as good an explanation as any. West Virginia is a totem; country roads connect this country, just as the song has done for more than 50 years. Everyone, somewhere, has a country road. Everyone has some idea of home.
Danoff found his on a drive through Maryland in 1970. He and his then-wife, Taffy Nivert, were living in Washington, trying to put together a music career, singing and writing folk songs from a basement apartment on Q Street in Georgetown.
"It flooded when it rained," he said. "It had a lot of cockroaches. It was awful."
The song began forming during a drive along Clopper Road in Gaithersburg. He saw silos and cows, and the landscape carried him back to his youth in western Massachusetts.
"I kept thinking, ‘Boy, this reminds me so much of growing up,'" Danoff said. "Everybody must have had that kind of experience."
That line may be the key to the whole song. The details were his. The feeling was not.
Danoff and Nivert, who had opened for Denver as a folk duo at the Cellar Door, a popular club in Georgetown, had much of the song written before they shared it with him. Danoff still needed lyrics for the bridge - the "I hear her voice in the morning hour" section - and he later changed the second verse, which originally included the lines "Naked ladies, men who look like Christ, and a dog named Poncho nibbling on the rice."
But the bones were there. When Denver heard it, he recognized something immediately. (Denver died in 1997 at age 53.)
"We showed it to John, and he said, ‘Wow, that's a hit song,'" Danoff said.
Danoff thought so, too, though not in the way history would prove. Maybe it would be a small, local hit. Instead, "Country Roads" became one of those songs that has traveled the world without a passport.
Danoff has heard it in movies, commercials, arenas and bars. The tweens and teens of American summer camps know it cold. An Irish friend once told Danoff that if you walked into an average pub, half the people might not know the words to the Lord's Prayer, but they'd all know every word of "Country Roads."
Asked what made it so popular, Danoff laughed.
"If we knew that s---, we would've written a bunch of them," he said.
His simplest explanation may be the truest.
"It's easy to sing," Danoff said, "and people know the words."
That has made it particularly useful in soccer, where songs are part of the experience. A pop hit becomes a stadium chant. A ballad becomes a battle cry.
Winning - particularly the Americans' dominant victory over Paraguay in their opening match - helped elevate the song. Songs need memories, and this U.S. team has kept giving its supporters moments to attach to the chorus.
Tim Ream, the veteran defender and U.S. captain, seemed almost startled by the sight of it all.
"It was incredible," Ream said. "I had to ask myself, 'Is this real life?'"
After four games, the players know now to gather. The fans know to stay. That connection is what anthems do best. They collapse the distance between performer and audience, player and fan, stranger and stranger. For a few minutes, no one is analyzing tactics, lineups or the bracket. They are standing in the same place, singing the same words.
The particular gift of "Country Roads" is that it does not require much from anyone. It does not ask people to agree about America, only to participate in a shared feeling that sounds like America at its least complicated: mountains, roads, home.
If the Americans win Monday, they would advance to a quarterfinal game in Los Angeles, a 3 p.m. start. If they manage to score there, the U.S. team could turn to another Danoff hit from the 1970s: "Afternoon Delight."
For now, though, the song that began in a leaky basement apartment in Georgetown is traveling with the U.S. team to Seattle. Belgium awaits Monday night, and with it the usual pressures of a World Cup knockout game.
Win or lose, the players and their fans will gather. Few, if any, will be thinking about the Blue Ridge Mountains, Clopper Road, Q Street or the long, strange path from a hippie apartment to a World Cup stadium.
They will just sing, together.
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