Dr. Sarah Morris, Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Program at WVU, published her first book, Lessons from “Take Me Home, Country Roads”: Identity Be(Longing), and Imagined Landscapes with WVU Press in October 2025.
The song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” made famous by John Denver in the 1970s, is an anthem for West Virginia, and it resonates with people all around the world. At a karaoke night in Morgantown, in a pub in Dublin, on a mountaintop in Thailand, or anywhere else you go, you can find people belting out the lyrics of this song. Why is “Country Roads” so compelling to so many people?
Growing up in West Virginia, “Country Roads” had always been a part of Sarah Morris’ understanding of her sense of place. For her, it was the song of West Virginia. It really wasn’t until she was an adult that Morris realized that there were other songs about West Virginia.
A West Virginia native, Sarah Morris spent the first chapter of her career as a high school English teacher in Berkley Springs, West Virginia. After nearly a decade of teaching high school students, Morris couldn’t ignore her desire to delve deeper into the exploration of the nature of human experience. Morris left teaching and joined the PhD program in Curriculum and Instruction, with a concentration in English education, at the University of Maryland to pursue her passion. After earning her doctorate, she eventually made her way back home to West Virginia to begin her life as Assistant Professor of English at WVU.
As a faculty member, one of Morris’ responsibilities includes teaching composition courses. She found that her students were struggling with rhetorical analysis, so she introduced “Country Roads” as a text that they could look at in lots of different ways. Since everyone is familiar with that song, Morris’ strategy clicked with her students. How does the song describe place? Where does it fail? What are some other songs that more accurately describe place, and why aren’t those other songs as compelling to us? What does it mean to grow up in a place that is made so popular through a catchy tune that so inaccurately captures its true identity? What does it mean to have an identity that comes somewhat from the outside?
This work with her English 101 and 102 students led Morris to keep investigating these questions as a scholar. Her first book is the result of several years of careful research on these questions and others. Morris’ book explores, among other themes, the ways in which this classic American tune taps into an “existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home.” We all have, according to Morris, a deep longing to feel a sense of belonging to a place. This existential longing for place or home is captured by the Welsh term ‘hiraeth,’ and Morris’ analysis of the appeal of “Country Roads” makes brilliant use of the concept.
Morris thinks that we all have this longing for home and everyone will create something to fulfill it. Even those who identify as wanderers or placeless in some way have this need and find something to fill it. For some people, their sense of home just looks a little different. Perhaps it is a baseball field or a playground or just being anywhere with family. This longing will be satisfied in one way or another. “Human beings are creators, we imagine, we find connections even when there are none – sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment.”
Morris views “Country Roads” as a kind of “never been” image of West Virginia, but one that can easily be dropped in to satisfy this universal need for a sense of belonging to a place. But why West Virginia? According to Morris, “Country Roads” paints a portrait of a place that we embrace easily because West Virginia is so complicated. West Virginia’s history made it primed for outside naming.
Throughout its history, West Virginia has been controlled from the outside in so many different ways - economically, historically, and culturally. During the late 1960’s, when the song was written, West Virginia was “all over the collective national radar and yet still unknown.” This period saw the establishment of the Appalachian Regional Commission, there was a lot of bridge building and road building, and there was Kennedy’s famous speech. “It was easy for songwriters to think about this place that everyone is hearing about, a place that’s just sitting there on the edge, and call it into being in a way that was both uninformed and universal.”
Grab a copy of Sarah’s book to engage even deeper into this analysis!