RIP Jim Weatherly (Midnight Train to Georgia); interesting history of the song

quote:

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One evening in 1970, Jim Weatherly picked up the phone and called his friend Lee Majors, the film and television actor who would soon became known as “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Mr. Weatherly, a struggling songwriter, had been a star quarterback at Ole Miss before moving to Los Angeles, where he bonded with Majors through a flag-football league, playing against the likes of James Caan.

Instead of Majors, the actor’s new girlfriend, Farrah Fawcett, answered the phone.

“Just during the course of the conversation, she mentioned she was packing her clothes and she was going to take the midnight plane to Houston to visit her family,” Mr. Weatherly later recalled. “?‘Midnight plane to Houston’ got kind of stuck in my mind in bold letters. When I got off the phone, I wrote ‘Midnight Plane to Houston’ in about 30 to 45 minutes.”

... his publisher soon got a call from Sonny Limbo, an Atlanta producer who wanted to record it with soul singer Cissy Houston, the mother of Whitney.

There was just one problem. As Houston later told the Wall Street Journal, “My people are originally from Georgia and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains.” What about changing the song’s title to “Midnight Train to Georgia”?

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