The story goes that folkie John Denver was just 22 years old when he played at Arizona’s Lumber Mill Club in Scottsdale and met a girl named Bobbie Wargo.
The two had much in common. Both grew up in military families. Both were musicians and aspiring songwriters. Both were looking for love.
And love was what they found as they played together at her parents’ piano. It was for her that John wrote one of his first songs. And “For Bobbie” was to be the first original tune that Denver ever recorded.
I’ll walk in the rain by your side, I’ll cling to the warmth of your hand…
Bobbie Wargo may have contributed to the song’s lyrics; there is evidence that she also might have been the inspiration for his next song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
(All of this was half a decade before John Denver met the iconic “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” recorded it and, as reported here earlier, became forever an honorary Mountaineer.)
“For Bobbie” was, as Denver later told writer Deborah Evans Price in American Songwriter magazine, “an early attempt to order my romantic thoughts.”
The Song’s Recording History
The song was first recorded by the Mitchell Trio under the truncated title of “For Bobbi” in 1965, the same year in which Denver joined the group, replacing founder Chad Mitchell who had moved on to a solo career.
The following year the song took a whole new turn when Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul & Mary) rechristened it “For Baby” and recorded it to honor her young daughter Erika.
Travers changed the meaning to reflect a mother’s love for her newborn, and this version gained significant popularity. The song appears on the 1975 Peter, Paul & Mommy, Too album as part of a medley entitled “Poem for Erika/For Baby”
That wasn’t PP&M’s first outing with it; nine years earlier, in 1966, “For Baby (For Bobbie)” appeared on the group’s sixth studio release called simply Album.
Meanwhile, Denver himself re-recorded the song — this time also listing it as “For Baby (For Bobbie)” — on his popular 1972 Rocky Mountain High, his first Top-10 album.
In the seven years between Denver’s first and second release of the song, a half dozen other artists covered “For Baby (For Bobbie)” including Bobby Darin (1966), Dion and the Belmonts (1967) and Anne Murray (1968).
Our Take on the Tune
One of the first tunes that Charlie Bowen and his cousin Kathy Castner did when they started singing together more than 30 years ago was Denver’s lullaby-like love song.
So it’s only natural that “For Baby (For Bobbie)” is in the mix whenever Kathy gets to make one of her rare trips from Cincinnati to Huntington to sit in with the band. Here’s a take on the tune from last weekend.
Since Flood harmonicat Sam St. Clair couldn’t make it that evening, we corralled the player whom Sam lovingly calls his “overstudy,” the incomparable Jim Rumbaugh, to sit it and bring some memorable solos.
And Now From the Wayback Machine…
Oh, and want a little trip down mem’ry lane? Here’s a video of a For Baby Moment that Pamela Bowen caught almost a decade and half ago:
From the summer of 2011 in the Bowen House, this performance is complete with sweet solos by Dave Peyton and Jacob Scarr.
