John Denver & Emmylou Harris

One duet

There was no standing duo; the pairing is a single record, "Wild Montana Skies", billed on the 1983 single as John Denver and Emmylou Harris. Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., John Denver, was born on December 31, 1943 in Roswell, New Mexico, sang with the Chad Mitchell Trio from 1965, went solo in 1969 and broke through with Poems, Prayers and Promises (1971). He ran a string of number-one songs and albums in 1974 and 1975 and was named CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1975. He died on October 12, 1997, aged 53. Emmylou Harris, born April 2, 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama, had already had five number-one country hits when they recorded together.

Denver's song came on the album It's About Time (RCA, November 15, 1983), his seventeenth studio album, produced by Denver and Barney Wyckoff at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami. The Grunge website, a single secondary source, says Denver wrote it in one night after a performance at Harrah's in Tahoe, with Harris's voice in mind, and that the two had known each other since the late 1960s from the Philadelphia Folk Festival; he told the Associated Press in 1983 that a song comes and totally takes over. That account is not confirmed by a primary source.