Jim Weatherly, whose song 'Midnight Train to Georgia' started with a plane to Houston, dies at 77

Washington Post
By Harrison Smith
Feb. 4, 2021 at 8:56 p.m. EST

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.”

Mr. Weatherly thought he had written a country love song, a potential hit for a guitar-picking crossover artist like Glen Campbell. He recorded it himself to attract attention — “L.A. proved too much for the girl,” he sang in the opening lines, “so she’s leaving the life we’ve come to know” — and 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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jim-weatherly-dead/2021/02/04/b93f0fba-6711-11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html