Gladys Knight & The Pips – Midnight Train To Georgia (1973)

In 1999, “Midnight Train to Georgia” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It currently ranks #432 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The song was originally written and performed by Jim Weatherly under the title “Midnight Plane to Houston”, which he recorded on Jimmy Bowen’s Amos Records.

“It was based on a conversation I had with somebody… about taking a midnight plane to Houston,” Weatherly recalls. “I wrote it as a kind of a country song. Then we sent the song to a guy named Sonny Limbo in Atlanta and he wanted to cut it with Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney and aunt of singers Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick)… he asked if I minded 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.'”

Weatherly, at a program in Nashville, said he was the quarterback at the University of Mississippi, the NFL didn’t work out for him, so he was in LA trying to write songs.

He was in a Rec football league with Lee Majors and called Majors one night. Farrah Fawcett answered the phone and he asked what she was doing. She said she was “taking the midnight plane to Houston” to visit her family.

He thought that was a catchy phrase for a song, and in writing the song, wondered why someone would leave LA on the midnight plane – which brought the idea of a “superstar, but he didn’t get far.”

Weatherly’s publisher forwarded the song to Gladys Knight and the Pips, who followed Houston’s lead and kept the title “Midnight Train to Georgia.” In her autobiography, “Between Each Line of Pain and Glory”, Gladys Knight wrote that she hoped the song was a comfort to the many thousands who come each year from elsewhere to Los Angeles to realize the dream of being in motion pictures or music, but then fail to realize that dream and plunge into despair.

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