John Denver & Cass Elliot – Leaving on a Jet Plane

John Denver hosted the very first Midnight Special, and the night’s quiet peak was a duet with a friend who had two years left to live

When NBC launched The Midnight Special as a 90-minute late-night music show on August 19, 1972, John Denver was the host, and the whole broadcast carried a purpose beyond music: it was an election year, and the program leaned hard on getting young people registered to vote. Midway through, Denver brought out an old friend from the folk circuit, Cass Elliot — Mama Cass of the Mamas & the Papas — who spoke briefly about voter apathy before the two of them sat down together for Leaving on a Jet Plane. His tenor, her contralto, one acoustic guitar, one live take. It is one of the very few times the two were filmed singing together, and Elliot had barely two years left to live.

Keep watching: John Denver – Take Me Home, Country Roads · John Denver – Thank God I’m a Country Boy

The song they sang was already older than most listeners realized, and it belonged to Denver from the start. He wrote it in 1966 at an airport near Washington, D.C., a young and largely unknown folk singer worn down by constant travel. He called it Babe, I Hate to Go, cut a rough version for a demo collection titled John Denver Sings, and handed copies to friends as Christmas presents that year. His producer, Milt Okun, talked him into a better title, and in 1967 it became Leaving on a Jet Plane.

Peter, Paul and Mary heard it early. They recorded it for their 1967 album Album 1700, but their label sat on it until September 1969, when it finally went out as a single. It became the biggest record of the trio’s career — No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, their only chart-topper and, as it turned out, their last hit. Denver recorded his own version that same year for his debut album Rhymes & Reasons, and RCA released it as a single in October 1969. His did not chart at all. For a while his best-known credit was as the man who wrote the song someone else took to No. 1.

Two voices that only rarely met

By August 1972 both singers were in transit between chapters. Denver was on the edge of superstardom — Rocky Mountain High was months away, Take Me Home, Country Roads already behind him — while Elliot was several years into a solo career after the Mamas & the Papas had come apart. Their paths did not cross often; they worked opposite corners of the same folk-pop world. On The Midnight Special those corners met. Elliot brought a warmth and a slight ache to a song about goodbyes, and Denver, playing host on his own show, gave her the space to carry it. Watching it now, with both singers long gone — Elliot in 1974, Denver in a 1997 plane crash — the performance holds a weight neither of them could have felt in the moment. It is a single evening of television, preserved, from a night that was really about something else.