Annie's Song

Denver wrote it in January 1973 in about ten and a half minutes, on the lift to the top of Aspen Mountain, just after skiing a difficult run. It was a love song for his wife Annie Martell Denver. She recalled that for him it became "a bit like a prayer". Milt Okun remembered telling Denver that the melody matched the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Denver went to the piano for an hour and came back with only the first five notes left.

It was the lead single from Back Home Again and spent two weeks at number one in the US in July 1974. It also topped the Easy Listening chart and was Billboard's number 25 song of the year. In the UK it went to number one and remained his only major hit single there. Stereogum's Tom Breihan wrote that the song is so sentimental it risks corniness, and that its sincerity "is why it works". Four years later James Galway's instrumental version became his only major British hit.

Live and covers

The live album An Evening with John Denver has a 3:32 version, and the 2007 release Live in the USSR includes a previously unreleased rendition in Russian. Ville Valo released a Finnish version, Olet mun kaikuluotain, in July 2016, which reached number one on the Finnish download chart. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes covered it on Love Their Country in 2006. Sheffield United supporters sing their own words to the tune, and Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album carried a parody of its opening bars.