The great American soul band Gladys Knight & The Pips had one of their biggest hits in 1973 with the heartbreak narrative of big-city failure in ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’. The much-covered soul classic tells the story of a woman whose man once dreamed of superstardom in LA but, his hopes crushed, is retreating to – as the song puts it – ‘a simpler place and time’. The female narrator is declaring that her place is alongside him: ‘I’d rather live with him in his world/Than live without him in mine’.
The tune joined a rich body of American, especially African–American, train songs in the US, stretching from the Delta blues to R&B, although this is a song of retreat rather than escape. Yet when singer-songwriter Jim Weatherly wrote it as a pop-country number in 1972, he was thinking not of trains or even of Georgia, but of a throwaway line from his former football buddy Lee Major’s girlfriend, Farrah Fawcett. Chatting on the phone to Weatherly, Fawcett – soon to be a superstar herself in The Six Million Dollar Man and Charlie’s Angels – said she was packing to catch a midnight plane to Houston. The line teased away at Weatherly, and ‘Midnight Plane to Houston’ was the title he gave the song that he recorded himself soon after writing it, in which it is the man who faithfully upends his life for a woman.
The soul singer Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney) heard ‘Midnight Plane to Houston’ and decided to record its first cover version, in January 1973. But the title irked. It wasn’t the collision of Houstons – singer and subject – that bothered her, but one of authenticity. If she was going to sing this song, she had to feel it. And, she later said, ‘My people are originally from Georgia and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains.’
Cissy’s producer asked Weatherly for permission to change the title and lyrics to reflect that. ‘We said, “Change anything but the writer and publisher”,’ the songwriter told Gary James of the Classic Bands website. ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ was the title that stuck, even when Weatherly re-recorded his own song in 2003.
Cissy Houston had a respectable R&B hit with her account of the song, giving it a female voice and, by adding harmonica, a country-ish feel. It was this version that Gladys Knight was to hear soon afterwards. Gladys Knight & The Pips had already had a hit with another Jim Weatherly song, ‘Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)’, in 1972. They recorded the renamed ‘Midnight Train’ in August 1973. They too added to and tweaked some of the lines, again with Weatherly’s blessing. It was Knight who upgraded the man’s longing for success in Los Angeles to an ambition to be a superstar. Knight’s version is also wordier than both previous recordings, to take account of the important vocal role played by the Pips.
The song went on to hit Number 1 and to win a Grammy. But, as with the similarly travel-themed Glen Campbell song, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, some listeners challenged its logistics. Geoff Turner, a producer at Canada’s CBC Radio and ‘son of a rail nut’, only recently confirmed with Amtrak that there were no trains from LA leaving for Georgia at midnight in August 1973, or indeed any direct trains. In 2016 he got in touch with Weatherly about the apparent error, who explained the evolution of the title to him. ‘So many little miracles … happened to make that song get to where it got, in Gladys’s hands,’ said Weatherly. ‘It was just totally amazing to me.’
Over the years Weatherly will have been grateful he insisted on his copyright, as covers emerged from performers as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, Garth Brooks (who used the third person) and the comedian Sandra Bernhard.
Gladys Knight’s version of the song is beautifully embellished by her backing singers, The Pips, with their signature lines and railroad ‘Whoo-whoos’. And in 1977 they had their moment in the spotlight on a Richard Pryor television special. Contractual difficulties had forced the band apart temporarily, so the Pips (billed, literally, as ‘And the Pips’) performed their entire backing vocals to ‘Midnight Train’ – alongside a spot-lit lone mic stand where Gladys Knight should have been. It was a triumph.
Sue Norris