"Midnight Train to Georgia" - Fifty Years

(The following post is a revision of comments I made about this song for my "Music Video Of the Week" feature.)

This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Gladys Knight and the Pips' recording of "Midnight Train to Georgia," but it's not not the fiftieth anniversary of the song.  The original song, composed in 1972, wasn't written as a soul song about traveling to Georgia. It wasn't even originally about traveling to Georgia.  But as covered by Gladys Knight and the Pips, "Midnight Train to Georgia" released by Knight and her backing group as a single fifty years ago this month - ended up becoming no just their signature song and the definitive version but also became possibly the greatest R&B song of the seventies.  And this was the decade that had Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and Philly soul.

The song was originally composed and performed by Jim Weatherly, a white country singer from Mississippi who had relocated to Los Angeles.  Weatherly originally wrote and recorded it with the title "Midnight Plane to Houston,"  "It was based on a conversation I had with somebody . . . about taking a midnight plane to Houston," Weatherly recalls. He later revealed that the somebody was Farrah Fawcett, who at the time was in her pre-fame stage and was married to Lee Majors. a friend of Weatherly's.  When he called Majors, Fawcett answered the phone and briefly talked with Weatherly, as Majors was out of the house.  The Texas-born Fawcett said she was taking a plane to Houston that was scheduled to leave at midnight (2:00 AM Houston time) to visit family back in Texas.  Weatherly thought that "Midnight Plane to Houston" would make a good song title, and he imagined a failed movie actress going home to Texas with her LA boyfriend by her side, preferring to go with her rather than let her go.

"I wrote it as a kind of a country song," Weatherly, who died in 2021, remembered "Then we sent the song to a guy named Sonny Limbo in Atlanta and he wanted to cut it with Cissy Houston."  But Cissy Houston - Whitney's mother - balked at the titl,. Not only was it obviously absurd for a woman named Houston to sing about going to Houston, but, as Cissy Houston later recalled, her family had always traveled by rail, not air.  So Sonny Limbo asked Weatherly if he would mind if he changed the title to "Midnight Train to Georgia". And I said, 'I don't mind. Just don't change the rest of the song.'"  (And you have to admit, "Midnight Plane to Houston" doesn;t sound very romantic.)  Cissy Houston released her version of "Midnight Train To Georgia," with both a gender and title change, in 1973. 

Soon after, Glady Knight and the Pips left Motown for Buddah Records, and the Atlanta-born Knight knew she needed a hit out of the gate with her new label.  She hadn't gotten much love from Motown, as Berry Gordy, Detroiter that he was, treated Diana Ross like Chevrolet whereas Knight had been a Pontiac-like afterthought. Weatherly's publishing company forwarded a copy of Cissy Houston's cover and Knight and the Pips - Eddie Patten, William Guest, and Knight's brother Merald "Bubba" Knight - worked out an arrangement that featured a straightforward soul backing track with a series of call-and-response lines from the Pips.

As recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips," Midnight Train to Georgia" became more than just a song about a man going home after failing to make it as a movie actor in Hollywood.  In the early seventies, many black Americans whose families had moved up north or out west from the old Confederacy had felt unlucky and unwelcome in other parts of the country and were ready to return to their ancestral homelands in the South.  Many blacks from Georgia decided that, despite the racism back home, it would be easier to post-civil-rights -era America to establish a Jerusalem on the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta than find one on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, the banks of the Hudson River in New York, or the shore of the Pacific Ocean in LA.  

Many American blacks, whose customs, roots, and traditions were all in the South, were ready to look homeward and go back to the lives and the collective world they'd left behind.  After all, segregation had become illegal by the 1970s, and more investment was going into the Southern states, which led to Atlanta and Houston becoming the New South's equivalents of New York and Chicago, respectively, and by 1973, black political power in northern cities had become a meaningless victory.  In November 1973, Coleman Young was elected the first black mayor of newly black-majority Detroit - just as the Arab Oil Embargo hit and doomed the American automakers to a long and slow decline in the face of foreign competition, making the mayoralty of a once-proud industrial city much less desirable than it had been as recently as 1965, the year of the last mayoral election before the Detroit race riot.   "Midnight Train to Georgia" became more than a song about a woman giving up her world for her failed-actor boyfriend returning to his own world - much more, in fact, than Jim Weatherly could have imagined.

Maybe that's why "Midnight Train to Georgia" became a number-one hit on the Billboard singles chart in the weeks ending October 27 and November 3, 1973.  r maybe because it was - and is - just a damn good song. 
Without further ado, here is Gladys Knight and the Pips' version of "Midnight Train to Georgia."