While a student at Georgetown University, singer-songwriter Bill Danoff worked nights as a sound and light man at Washington, DC's Cellar Door, a funky little nightclub that featured an eclectic mix of national folk and jazz acts, similar to New York City's Bitter End and San Francisco's Hungry i. Upon graduation, he began pursuing his own music full time by forming the folk duo, Fat City, partnering up with singer Taffy Nivert. Not unlike other acoustic-oriented folk musicians of the era, Fat City would create original music that fell somewhere between the more traditional topical folk music of the 1960s and the more confessional introspective singer-songwriter movement emerging in the early 1970s.
John Denver, who often played the Cellar Door, became an early acquaintance of the group. Upon the recommendation of club manager Alan Cowell, Denver visited the duo during the summer of 1970, when they were performing at another local club. Cowell had recommended to Denver a Fat City original called "I Guess He'd Rather Be In Colorado." After the club closed that evening, Danoff and Nivert played the song for Denver. Indeed impressed enough to want to record it, Denver called from New York City several weeks later to say that not only had he recorded their song, but that Mary Travers of the popular folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, was going to feature it on her first solo album, thus establishing legitimate songwriter credentials to Fat City. Shortly afterward, they co-authored "Take Me Home Country Roads" with Denver, during a stint opening for him at the Cellar Door. After recording the song with Denver, they began touring with him, developing a following of their own. In late 1972, they changed the name of the duo to Bill And Taffy and released Pass It On, the first album under their own names the following year.
Bill and Taffy would continue performing as a duo, crisscrossing the country as openers for John Denver. Moderate success would continue up to 1976, when the duo would merge with the duo of Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman to form the Starland Vocal Band. Their first single "Afternoon Delight" would became a worldwide chart-topper, earning the group two Grammy awards for "Best new artist of 1976" and "Best arrangement for voices," bringing Danoff and Nivert greater publicity and recognition than they ever imagined possible.