I hate to do this but I'm going to make some of you feel really old.

John Denver's song Rocky Mountain High is 50 years old.

The actual date of the release of the song is 50 years old in October.

Here's a bit of trivia you might not have known, John Denver, was not his real name. He was born in New Mexico as Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. Good thing he changed is. Who would be able to pronounce that last name much less spell it?

"Rocky Mountain High" was born in Denver's mind when he was 27 years old. He was camping with friends in Aspen.

It was during that night that he witnessed a Perseid meteor shower while camping with friends (including his then-wife Annie Martell) at Williams Lake. The singer wrote about the experience in his autobiography.

"I remember, almost to the moment, when that song started to take shape in my head. We were working on the next album and it was to be called Mother Nature's Son, after the Beatles song, which I'd included," Denver wrote. "It was set for release in September. In mid August, Annie and I and some friends went up to Williams Lake to watch the first Perseid meteor showers. Imagine a moonless night in the Rockies in the dead of summer and you have it. I had insisted to everybody that it was going to be a glorious display. Spectacular, in fact."

But the meteor show was not over. It just kept getting bigger until it seemed like the sky was on fire.

NurPhoto via Getty Images
NurPhoto via Getty Images
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"I went back and lay down next to Annie in front of our tent, thinking everybody had gone to sleep, and thinking about how in nature all things, large and small, were interwoven, when swoosh, a meteor went smoking by," wrote Denver. "And from all over the campground came the awed responses 'Do you see that?' It got bigger and bigger until the tail stretched out all the way across the sky and burned itself out. Everybody was awake, and it was raining fire in the sky."

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