“Take Me Home, Country Roads” is wrong about West Virginia geography
The John Denver song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is not really referring to West Virginia geography, but “western Virginia” geography.
The second line of the song, “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River” identifies two clear geographic features that are more relevant to western Virginia than West Virginia.
Blue Ridge Mountains
The “Blue Ridge Mountains” mentioned in the lyrics is a 615-mile-long mountain sub-range that is almost entirely in Virginia and North Carolina. Just 14 miles of the Blue Ridge Mountains defines the WV-VA border. So technically WV does contain the western slope of those mountains.
This map shows the extent of the Blue Ridge Mountains and a detail of the short length of the Blue Ridge Mountains that define the WV border:
Shenandoah River
The Shenandoah River proper is 56 miles long: 36 miles are in Virginia, 20 miles are West Virginia. And the part in WV is less than 3 miles inside the West Virginia border running adjacent to the Blue Ridge Mountains. So the minority of the river is just barely in West Virginia territory.
The Shenandoah River also has two tributaries named the North Fork Shenandoah River and the South Fork Shenandoah River. They add another 100 miles of “Shenandoah River” that are entirely within Virginia.
So what mountains are in West Virginia?
West Virginia has a bunch of mountain sub-ranges that are part of the Appalachian Mountain Range: the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians (eastern border), the Allegheny Mountains (less east), the Allegheny Plateau (west), and the Cumberland Mountains (south). The Blue Ridge Mountains are also part of the Appalachian Mountain Range, but are basically not in West Virginia.
