Jim Weatherly (photo: Steven S. Harman/The Tennessean)
The whole thing started with touch football.
See, Jim Weatherly wasn’t into the tackle game anymore. He’d quarterbacked the University of Mississippi Rebels and was good enough to be an honorable-mention All-American and the second-string all-SEC quarterback behind some Crimson Tider named Joe Namath.
He’d done all that even as the campus roiled with conflict: In 1962 a black student named James Meredith won the right to attend the formerly all-white school, and violence and mayhem ensued. That same year, the football team won a national championship.
Weatherly was also a music man, and he decided to forgo opportunities to play for Boston in the American Football League and to try out for Dallas Cowboys in favor of moving out west to make music in well-integrated Los Angeles.
"I’ve never liked having somebody else in charge of my future,” Weatherly says. “Playing pro ball, they can trade you or cut you, and it’s a very stressful situation. You have to constantly compete for your job. I decided to go with what I was doing that was a lot of fun, which was making music.”
Meeting Farrah
Weatherly is a Middle Tennessean now, due in large part to his monumental successes as a songwriter. Those successes began exactly 40 years ago, with ... hold on, first the touch football thing.
In Los Angeles, he decided to play in a touch football league, for fun. The other guys were nice and even let him play quarterback. It was a pretty competitive league — former UCLA quarterback Mark Harmon was field general for another team — and Weatherly could get his sports jollies without fear of getting too dinged up.
Weatherly played on a team with Lee Majors, who would later become television’s “Six Million Dollar Man,” and with musician Gary Usher. And one day, he showed Usher some of his songs. Usher liked the songs and sent Weatherly to see a publisher/manager named Larry Gordon, who signed the one-time quarterback to a deal and began pitching his songs.
Oh, and Majors and Weatherly became friends, which meant Weatherly soon met Majors’ gorgeous young girlfriend, actress Farrah Fawcett. Weatherly called Majors’ place one day, and Fawcett answered and said she was packing her clothes to take the midnight plane to Houston and visit her family. A bell went off in Weatherly’s songwriting brain, and he spent the next 45 minutes scratching out a song called “Midnight Plane To Houston.” It was kind of a country song, and he made a guitar-vocal demo of it.
Publisher Gordon loved the song, and Weatherly figured incorrectly that Glen Campbell might record it. But soul singer Cissy Houston, mother of then-9-year-old Whitney Houston, took a crack at it, after changing the plane to a train and Houston to Georgia.
Then, Georgia native Gladys Knight — who had passed on “Midnight Plane to Houston” — heard Cissy Houston’s version and decided to record it herself, with backing vocalists The Pips adding some “woo-woos” and other ornamentations. Knight nailed the song in one pass in a Detroit studio, save for one line she re-sang later in New York.
“I remember sitting in Larry’s office when he got an early copy of it, and he played it for me and I sat there with my mouth open. It was like nothing I ever expected. She took it to places I’d never dreamed,” Weatherly says.
No. 1 hit changes things
And so, 40 years ago today, “Midnight Train to Georgia” became the No. 1 hit in the land, replacing the Rolling Stones’ “Angie.” (It had already topped “Billboard”’s Hot Soul Singles chart, where it remained for a month). It was the first chart-topper for Knight and for Weatherly.
The man who had played quarterback for segregated Mississippi was now the writer of a genuine soul smash. “Midnight Train” was also nominated for a best song Grammy, though it lost out to Stevie Wonder. Knight and the Pips did win a Grammy that year, though, as their version of the song was named best R&B vocal performance by a group.
“Once you have a No. 1 record, it kind of changes the way you feel about yourself,” Weatherly says. “There’ve been so many years of rejection, and when you finally get one, it feels like those people who turned you down were wrong, and that you were right to keep writing and struggling and trying and punching.”
Weatherly kept writing, though the struggling and punching stuff was no longer quite so necessary.
He wrote more hits for Gladys Knight, including “The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me,” “Neither One Of Us Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye,” “Where Peaceful Waters Flow” and “Love Finds Its Own Way.” He also released solo albums, scoring a Top 20 pop hit with “The Need To Be.” And he had country successes writing for Glen Campbell, Steve Wariner, Kenny Rogers, Reba McEntire, The Oak Ridge Boys, Vince Gill and many others.
Weatherly moved to Tennessee in the late 1980s, and he remains active and creative, though he tends not to write on autumn Friday nights, when son Zach Weatherly stars for Christ Presbyterian Academy.
This month, Weatherly celebrates three significant achievements: On Oct. 9, he was nominated for the Songwriters Hall of Fame (He’s already a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer); on Oct. 12, he was back in Oxford, Miss., for a 50th anniversary celebration of the last time Ole Miss won an SEC title; and today, he can look back on 40 years of “Midnight Train to Georgia” being in the pop music limelight.
“Over the years, it’s actually become better known,” he says. “They used it on ‘American Idol’ for something like six years in a row, so every year there it got reintroduced to people, and people kept buying it on iTunes. And other people have recorded it and performed it. Aretha Franklin did it live, Neil Diamond did a great ballad version, the Indigo Girls cut it. ... Some great songs never find a path, and then some find a path that goes on forever.”
The path of “Midnight Train to Georgia” began with touch football, and it has meandered all over the world since then. A couple of years ago, Weatherly went to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center for a Gladys Knight show that, of course, featured “Midnight Train” as its highlight. Backstage, Weatherly saw Knight’s brother, Bubba, one of the Pips who “woo-woo’ed” their way to popular ubiquity with Weatherly’s song.
“Aw, we hugged,” recalls Weatherly. “And then I said, ‘Bubba, we been riding that train a long time, haven’t we?’”
