Toots & The Maytals On Netflix’s ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ Soundtrack
Toots & The Maytals’ 1973 Reggae cover of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads was featured in Netflix’s latest movie Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
First released in September, the mystery film became available for streaming over the weekend. The movie, which is the second installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, following the 2019 original, stars Daniel Craig (as detective Benoit Blanc), who takes on a new case revolving around tech billionaire Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton) and his old friends.
Toots & The Maytals’ clever interpretation of Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, which appeared on their 1973 album In the Dark, plays in the living room after dinner while the gang gets drunk following Blanc’s premature solving of Miles’s mystery game, according to Screenrant.
The band’s version has Chris Blackwell, Dave Bloxham and Warrick Lyn credited as producers.
Denvers’ original track, which was released in 1971, was certified Platinum in the US in 2017. It became one of four official state anthems for West Virginia in 2014.
In 2019, Toots & The Maytals stopped by Spotify Studios in New York to re-record their cover of the classic song.
The band’s frontman Toots Hibbert, who died in 2020 at age 77, sings the song’s iconic chorus with a slight lyrical tweak: “Country road, take me home/To the place, I belong/West Jamaica, my oh my/Take me home, country road.”
It was announced earlier this month that Hibberts’ daughter Leba is now the lead singer of the group. The other members of the new group remain a mystery.
The announcement, which was made on what would have been Toots’ 80th birth anniversary on December 8, followed a settlement between the Hibbert estate and the former members of the band over the use of the Maytals name. Under the settlement, which was reached on December 8, 2021, the estate retained full ownership of the Maytals name and trademark.
In 2021, Toots and The Maytals won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album for their album Go To Be Tough. It was the second Grammy Award for the band, who won the Best Reggae Album in 2004 with their album True Love.
Toots and his band were responsible for some of the most iconic songs in Reggae history, including Pressure Drop, Bam Bam, Sweet And Dandy, 54-46, Beautiful Woman, Time Tough, and Monkey Man.
Time Tough recently appeared on The Man Who Fell To Earth (2022) on Showtime.
Take Me Home, Country Roads was also featured in an episode of Outer Banks in 2021, as was 54-46 in episodes of The Sara Cox Show (2019) and Narcos: Mexico (2018).