A Song's Best Friend: The Very Best of John Denver

This is the strongest single CD collection of John's music yet released. Furthermore, the sound quality is better than on any previous collection.

To those of you that think a single CD hardly does justice to John's music, well, I agree, but double CD's and boxed sets have been released previously while many of his original albumds have been released on CD (at least in America). Nevertheless, this is a great introduction to John's music.


Shame it's not a double   October 21, 2004
 27 out of 28 found this review helpful

Thirty years ago it was that the BBC enticed John Denver across the pond, gave him and his blend of seeming homespun country and folk songs a concert and then a primetime TV series with which he duly won the ears and hearts of the great British public. Most of this collection draws from his most popular mainstream material of that time through to the early 1980s, and the tunes have certainly stood the test of time, even if some of the lyrics may now be unfashionable. They track his development from one man and his guitar, singing "Poems Prayers and Promises" through the much-covered group number "Take Me Home, Country Roads", and the twee love song to his (then) wife Annie, to the rather over-produced, orchestra-led tribute to Jacques Cousteau, "Calypso", and the perhaps ill-advised duet with Placido Domingo, "Perhaps Love" - even on the back burner Domingo has more heat than most.

It's a fine single album tribute to the late singer and includes all his chart hits. A double album would have been even better, for there is much material on his LPs, both early and later, worthy of bringing to the attention of today's audience.