Country roads, take me home/To the place I belong/West Virginia, mountain momma/Take me home, country roads.

Those words, co-written and sung by John Denver are, understandably, extremely popular in the state which will hold the next primary in this exhilarating season. It will be heard many a time on the campaign trail.

Yet Denver was born not in West Virginia, but New Mexico. As a child of a military family he lived in several states but not West Virginia. He changed his surname from Deutschendorf as a tribute to the capital of his real favourite state (Colorado). The country roads which inspired the lyrics were actually in Maryland but that did not scan well (try singing “Maryland” in the chorus), so West Virginia was inserted instead. Put bluntly, Denver was a total phoney when it came to West Virginia but the locals still adored him.

Much the same will be true for Hillary Clinton. In so far as other Americans think of West Virginia at all, they dismiss it as a sort of Sleepwithyoursistersville hickland. This is somewhat harsh (although not totally so) but it is home to a disproportionately large number of white electors on low incomes and with modest levels of educational attainment. They are, in short, nothing like Mrs Clinton whatsoever but she will probably win this state by a larger margin than any other she has fought so far. This is partly because the Clinton brand plays well in a place which was the base for the fictional but plausible Waltons and also, frankly, just because she is not Barack Obama.

There is an intriguing historical aspect to all this. The only other presidential primary of consequence held in West Virginia was in 1960, an age when virtually all the delegates selected for the national conventions were party bosses and their followers not the choice of ordinary voters. Yet in order to impress that audience and convince them that his Roman Catholicism would not be the electoral liability that they feared, Kennedy stuck his name on the ballot in West Virginia, a state that was (and is) more than 90 per cent Protestant. He outspent his opponent (Hubert Humphrey) by an utterly outrageous amount and won comfortably. He duly killed off the religious issue.

If Mr Obama could do the same then he would end similar fears about what his race might mean in the November contest and demonstrate that he can connect with white working-class citizens. Yet in practice, even if he spends every dollar that he has in the bank and Mrs Clinton absolutely nothing, it is most unlikely that he will beat her. At the end of this battle, Mrs Clinton will be able to turn to him and state, adapting the line that Lloyd Bentsen skewered Dan Quayle with in a TV debate 20 years ago: “I did not know Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was no friend of mine, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”.

There is one final irony. John Denver was an affluent white liberal who was an environmental activist who favoured a pacifist foreign policy and denounced the American gun culture. If he were alive today and lived in West Virginia he would be among the relatively few there to vote for Mr Obama.

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