It’s not so easy to find a country song from the past that captures both obscurity and lasting magic—a song that never set the Nashville airwaves on fire, yet kindled that special spark for those lucky enough to hear it. But as I sit in my little house along the Zuid Willemsvaart here in Helmond and let the rain tap along my windows, my mind always floats to one such jewel: “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” by John Glenn:
You have to understand: John Glenn was never country radio gold. He was the man circling the outskirts of the Outlaw Country movement—not quite Waylon, not quite Townes, his voice like oaken whiskey, rich and rough. I first stumbled upon “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” when I was nineteen, a Dutch boy dreaming in English, hoping to find my place in a town thousands of miles from the Tennessee valleys I sang about. The album had been quietly slipped onto the shelf of an Eindhoven record shop, sandwiched between a battered Kenny Rogers single and an unloved Cat Stevens LP. I liked the cover—John in profile, not trying to smile—and took it home.
The needle found its groove, and the first chords drifted in, heavy and gentle all at once. Wilson sings:
*Last night I dreamed I was back in Georgia /
The Blue Ridge Mountains turning green…*
Right then, I felt as if the old wooden beams of my Dutch attic had been transplanted to some dusky porch in Dahlonega. Wilson had a way of taking melancholy and making it feel like old friends or warm bread, not something to be afraid of. The song continues:
*All my family gathered round me /
And mama’s cooking, mashed potatoes and beans…*
For a Helmond boy whose mother’s kitchen simmered with hutspot and rookworst, Wilson’s words made me yearn for a grandmother I never had in Appalachia. But the feeling was all the same. I still remember that hunger—the homesickness for a home I never knew.
What struck me then, and still strikes me now when I dust off that record, is how “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” is a song about the deep ache and comfort of memory—the way the past becomes a shelter and a wound. It isn’t a song built for line-dances or stadium barrooms. It is intimate, like a faded letter. The simplicity in the lyrics forms the song’s strength, conjuring both distance and belonging:
*Oh if I could change my way of living /
Or start my life all over again /
I’d answer when mama called me /
I’d be her baby till the end…*
Most country songs of the era were, by 1975, leaning full tilt into the bombastic, the slick, the rhinestone. Even Willie and Waylon sometimes dressed their sorrow in guitar bravado. But Larry Jon’s voice is full of cracks and riverbanks—he sounds like a man who’s lived every word. There are no soaring crescendos in the music. There’s only a gentle acoustic guitar, a brush of drums, and that bottomless drawl, painting a world you half-remember from your own past, no matter where you come from.
Sometimes, in Helmond, I’d ride my bicycle to the edge of the fields at dusk, the canals shining with last bits of daylight, and put Wilson’s song on my walkman. I’d close my eyes and imagine the Dutch willows turning into Georgia pines, the canals into muddy creeks. The words “Blue Ridge Mountains turning green / All my family gathered round me”—they filled the distance between here and there, between longing and peace.
Why didn’t the world take notice? The truth is, I think, that “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” asks for things modern life is poor at giving. It demands silence. It calls for patience. It rewards the listener who leans in, who lets the spaces between the words matter just as much as the words themselves.
As I grew—a young man learning to sing country verses with a Dutch accent others found peculiar—I found my voice in the quiet spaces of songs like Wilson’s. I learned that the heart of country music is not in the chorus that asks to be shouted, but in the line whispered from the kitchen after the lights go down. My father never understood my love for this music. “We have our own singers here, Kroes,” he’d say, shaking his head. But when I played him “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green,” even he grew quiet. I saw a tear he tried to hide. Sometimes, you don’t need to understand the words to feel the home inside them.
There are so many reasons I wish more people knew this song. It’s a compass for the lost, a prayer for the broken, a lullaby for the motherless. And yet, maybe its secret is its rarity. If you know it, you’re in a small club—a brotherhood of dreamers speaking the language of half-remembered places. Even now, when I dip into the local pub and a new friend asks about my influences, I mention Larry Jon Wilson and they look blank. Gentle reader, that is your invitation! Listen—and let “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” work its subtle alchemy.
For me, the song is an old photograph. The faces blur a little more each year, but the feeling—the hope, the homesick peace—remains vivid and alive, as green as the Georgia mountains Larry Jon sang about from so far away. From my little Dutch corner, I keep the song alive, and through it, the knowledge that there is always a home for us in the music, even if the world never put it on the charts.
Tonight, as the summer comes and Helmond’s fields bloom with cow parsley, I put “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green” on once more. The old ache comes gently, like evening fog, settling in my chest. I sit by my window, listen, and remember.
Yours in songs and memory,
Kroes den Bock