Kingston Crossroads: Re: "Angel From Montgomery"

I must slightly disagree with your assesment of JD and Angel.

I will say this is steeped in memory for me. I first hears it when I was barely 10 years old. I had received a few JD albums after becoming a young devotee. Farewell was one of them. I loved a few of the songs on it but "Angel" just nailed me. I wasn't all that clear in my understanding of what the words were about but the yearning of getting out of a life trapped resonated with me. I was stuck living in Florida with Mom when I wanted to be back home in Minnesota. I loved my Mom but detested Florida. Over the 15 years, it became a theme for me.

To John's credit, the song builds up and that electric guitar carries the bluesy angst as the song builds to the end. It's what gives that version it's heft to me. I love Prine's original and adore Raitt's version but Denver's will always be the one that speaks to my soul.
(Denver covered two other Prine songs brlliantly, "Spanish Pipedream" and "Paradise". Loved JD''s version of Paradise til I heard The Kruger Brothers version of it a few years ago.

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John Denver picked the song up immediately and included it on his 1973 album Farewell Andromeda , which sold well, reaching #16 on Billboard 's comprehensive charts, decidedly less that the #4 Rocky Mountain High LP that preceded it and Denver's two #1 Billboard albums that followed it, 1974's Back Home Again and 1975's Windsong .

Denver generally picked songs to cover that were well within his wheelhouse, but IMO he misstepped slightly with this one. Prine's original with that inimitable gravelly voice of his was perfect for the tune, and Bonnie Raitt was as fine a pop-blues singer as ever waxed a record and she knocked this one out of the park.

But Denver's voice was just a bit too sweet for "Angels"; the lyrics are dark to the point of desperation, and desperation is just not what John Denver did. Soaring optimism, love of nature, romantic idealization - that was JD's stock in trade, and no one else ever did those things quite the way or quite as well as he did. But the only attempt at anything bluesy that he tried subsequently were songs that he himself wrote - and "bluesy" or maybe better "blues-inflected" just aren't the same as blues.

So Ken gave us Prine's original; here's Raitt's excellent cover:

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And here's JD doing his best with it:

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