John Denver returns to Hot 100 Top 40 as writer thanks to MGK & Jelly Roll's 'Lonely Road'

Legendary folk-country icon John Denver returns to the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated Aug. 10) as a writer via MGK — formerly Machine Gun Kelly — and Jelly Roll's new single, “Lonely Road” .

The track, released on July 26, debuts at No. 33 on the Hot 100 with 10.5 million official streams, 646,000 in a radio audience and 12,000 sold in the United States in the week ending Aug. 1, according to Luminate.

Referring to himself and Jelly Roll as KellyRoll, MGK revealed that they worked on “Lonely Road” for “2 years [in] 8 different studios [and] 4 different countries [and] I changed the key 4 times.”

The song, MGK's fourth top 40 Hot 100 hit and Jelly Roll's seventh, reprises Denver's revolutionary anthem “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 1971. The singer and songwriter amassed 401 top hits by 1982, when “Shanghai Breezes” reached No. 31. He had four No. 1s, including seven top 10s.

Denver, who died in 1997, appears on the Hot 100's top 40 as a writer for the second time in the past decade – both via reworkings of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” In October 2016, “Forever Country”, by the artists of Then, Now and Forever, hit No. 21. The song, released to celebrate 50 years of the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards, is a medley of three favorites: “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You,” and Willie Nelson's “On the Road Again.” The all-star track also spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart.

“Lonely Road” simultaneously debuts at No. 13 on Hot Country Songs.

Denver's enduring original “Take Me Home, Country Roads” has attracted 931 million official US on-demand streams to date. It also has a total of 230 million radio airplay and has sold 1.8 million downloads.

Further upgrading her profile, Lana Del Rey's cover peaked at No. 23 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs last December.

Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert (then married) co-wrote the song from scratch and finished writing it with Denver. Since 2014, it has served as the official state song of West Virginia, while the Denver version was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023.

Springfield, Mass., native Danoff recalled in 2018 to Advertising sign that, after he began studying at Georgetown University in Washington, he had “a year where I did a lot of road trips. I was just fascinated by the outdoors … barns … things I had only seen in pictures. Suddenly I would become a true nature admirer. That's where all those “country roads” came from.