At the time, it marked the first piece of new music from band in six years. John Denver: All of My Memories: The John Denver Collection By Rob Caldwell / 11 February 2015 Denver’s image was wrapped in sincerity and disarming, if sometimes hokey, charm. The Essential John Denver It contains songs that cover a 26-year-long time span, from 1969's Leaving on a Jet Plane to 1995's Is It Love As noted earlier, Denver wrote mostly in the folk-country music genres, although he had some crossover success with Annie's Song, which he wrote for his first wife, Annie Martell-Denver. It doesn’t conjure up Boeing 707s or 747s for me as much as it does the simple scenes of leaving. In one of BBC Radio specials, Denver said about the song: This is a very personal and very special song for me. Stream ad-free with Amazon Music Unlimited on mobile, desktop, and tablet. John Denver, then a relatively unknown musician in the Los Angeles folk scene of 23 years old, had written the song during a layover at Washington Airport in 1966. Toots and the Maytals premiered “A Song Call Marley” on The Tonight Show last July before releasing the studio version a month later. Listen to your favorite songs from The Essential John Denver by John Denver Now. The band also breezed through “A Song Call Marley,” an understated reggae gem that doubles as an effusive tribute to the titular reggae legend. The Maytals then kicked out a groove that mixed a reggae backbeat with country flourishes while Toots sang the song’s iconic chorus with the perfect little lyric tweak: “Country road, take me home/To the place, I belong/West Jamaica, my oh my/Take me home, country road.” Toots and the Maytals slid into “Take Me Home” - which they originally covered on their 1973 album In the Dark - with a robust, gospel-tinged intro that ended with frontman Frederick Nathaniel “Toots” Hibbert unleashing a stunning vocal run. Reggae stalwarts Toots and the Maytals stopped by Spotify’s studios in New York to record a session that included their clever interpretation of John Denver’s classic, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” as well as their new song, “A Song Call Marley.”