Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight and the Pips
I usually take a dim view towards discussing music in the same vein that we talk about literature. When we use this literary vocabulary on music we inevitably turn songs into texts, and to my mind this puts too much emphasis on interpreting lyrics, determining the appropriate relationship of a song/album to the rest of the artist’s body of work, and most unnervingly, postulating whether the song has a broader cultural significance. As I’ve said before, I prefer a much more sensual, listener-centric discussion of songs, in which the song has no meaning and we don’t read much beyond how we feel when the music hits our ears. Literary language gives someone like Bob Dylan more credit than he deserves, in my opinion, and more direct pleasures like Phil Collins and most of pop music are rendered suspect.
Of course, I’ve over-simplifying things. We can’t but help hear lyrics and ponder their meaning, and knowing an artist’s biography and cultural significance can add a layer of interest to a song. And sometimes even someone like me breaks down and imbues a song with a much larger context that is probably appropriate.
I am speaking of the classic R&B song Midnight Train to Georgia, by Gladys Knight and the Pips, a truly fantastic song because it tells so many stories in such a confined space.
The narrative at the start of the song is that of a man returning to his home state of Georgia after failing to fulfill his dreams of becoming a star in Los Angeles. “LA proved too much for the man…so he’s leaving the life he’s come to know.” The name of the song alone is a powerful image of the despair, a long trek beginning in the middle of the night back across the United States.
I heard it a few months ago while driving home at night from work. I recently returned to a job that I left a year before in the hopes of moving on to bigger and better things, only to spin my wheels for several months, run out of money, and ask for my old job back. The song strongly resonated with me in this sense, but there was more to it.
“Midnight Train To Georgia” steps out from the pack of sad songs about lost dreams by the music backdrop and narrative shift that occurs halfway through the song. You see, if you listen to it, it isn’t really a sad song. There is the central lonely image of a man on a train in the middle of the night, but this image is then juxtaposed with the exuberance of Gladys Knight’s voice and her call-and-response singing with the Pips. Gladys Knight and the Pips are in good spirits, and the music, while possessing a degree of plaintive restraint, is also warm and soothing.
Why are they in good spirits about a failure? Because Gladys Knight’s narrator isn’t just a detached observer of this man on the train- she’s his lover. And she’s happy because for her this isn’t the end of a dream, but the start of her journey. She is going back with her man to Georgia, a place we presume she has never been. She’s had to make a decision about whether to stay in LA or go with him to Georgia, and: “I’d rather live in his world than live without him.” This isn’t just a song about his failure, but also a love song.
I suppose this song comforts me because by juxtaposing the two narratives in a single song it serves notice that failure need not be an all-encompassing event. It speaks to the elasticity of events in our lives, how thing look different depending on one’s perspective. Going back to Georgia isn’t necessarily giving up; it’s moving on and starting a new journey, exchanging a Hollywood dream for a more enduring dream of love. It’s a view that has helped me cope with the shame of finding myself in same place where I started from a few months ago.
Beyond my personal reading, I think this song is a true classic because it speaks to the flipside of the American dream. The man has come out West to be a star, and far from achieving his dreams through hard work, he has failed. For this alone the song serves as an important counterpoint to our Horatio Alger myths of the self-made man. The song tells the story of the countless people who have come out to LA and failed to make it in show business, and even beyond that, for me the song speaks for all those who left the East Coast in search of a better future and didn’t find it, to all those who came to this the US from other countries for the American dream and didn’t find what they were looking for.
“Midnight Train To Georgia” also strikes as being important for the way it distills the black experience in Americas into song. It doesn’t need to be discussed here that for most of American history the black experience of the American Dream has been of dreams deferred. The high hopes after the Civil War faded with the rise of Jim Crow and lynchings, and even when blacks migrated north in a historic shift for work opportunities at the beginning of the 20th Century, in these new places they often experienced the same discrimination and dearth of opportunities. Lately, they have been moving back south. According to Wikipedia:
“From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sunbelt than leaving it.”
I read this song of a man leaving LA to return to Georgia with this facet of African-American history in mind, and find that it makes the song more appealing to see in such a historical context. But again, just as I take don’t interpret the basic meaning of the song to be one of failure, I don’t take the historical message to be one of African-American failure.
If anything, it is exactly the opposite, for perhaps the most singular contribution of African-Americans to American culture has been the way in which they have overcome unimaginable hardship to forge an inspiring, life-affirming approach to art and life. Gladys Knight’s narrator is taking a failure and making it into something positive, and this vision of the train in the night seems to mirror the African-American experience. Taking the essential hardship of life and somehow finding enough that is life-affirming to go on- this is something in American art that is uniquely African-American. (Not that no one else, or no other culture did this before- just none did it as powerfully and universally accessible.)
A great song.
6 Comments
The strength of Dylan’s lyrics have made him a huge commercial success and an icon. These are not because of his musicianship, true, but isn’t making a statement that these ends he has received are more than he is due a little overstated?
I am not a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. His musicianship is incredible, but the lyrics are often void or buried beneath long and loud guitar licks. It’s just what you like…
Dylan didn’t set out to copy a guitarist who sang. He found a poet who played guitar in Woody Guthrie. That’s who he modeled himself after and who he made his hero.
There is zero doubt in my mind Dylan would have almost no impact on popular culture forty years later if he spent the majority of his time on musicianship and decided to pass on lyrical finesse. We might not even know his name today.
The cream, as it where, rises to the top.
I don’t in any way begrudge Bob Dylan for following his muse, nor do I think he would have benefited from being a superior guitar player or taking singing lessons. He has written some songs I find incredibly beautiful, and in which his singing and playing are integral to making such great music.
But take a song like “Tangled Up in Blue”. I find this song to be musically rote, with a repetitive and rather unimaginative guitar pattern, and sung in a casual, unemotive voice. Yet because this song tells a story and has some clever imagery it will forever trump, at least for serious students of music, something like Phil Collins’ True Colors, which is a cover of a cheesy old standard by a commercial pop star.
I have no language to really convey what a tonic True Colors is for me, how the tone of the drums in this song and the melding of the backing vocals meld perfectly with Collins’ lead to make the closest thing I have to a security blanket. In a contest of Collins vs. Dylan, I lose every time. I know, because I have tried, and Dylan fans can draw on the world of literary language and I have nothing to match them.
If we want to compare Dylan to contempory poets, that’s fine. I personally think poets like Phillip Larkin or Seamus Haney operate on a purely lyrical plane far above Dylan, but that’s not Dylan’s fault, because Dylan was never really a poet. He was making music in the end, albeit extremely poetic, narrative music, but music nonetheless.
I actually used to like Phil Collins, truth be known. I owned several Genesis albums. I have just recovered a box of mixtapes from adolescence and it is amazing to be able to visit the past in this way, a lot of music I have forgot over the years. I notice a distinction between the tastes say from my teens to my twenties… if I could characterize it the music of my teens was more overt in its expression, very much poppy unnaunced sound, some of which I still do like. I plan to compile a few playlists from these mixtapes equivalent to my beaches playlist of yore.
I am not sure how to describe what I am looking for now in music… pop music is typically too simplistic for what I am looking for, there needs to be a certain human presence, a certain emotive sincerity that I can feel. A lot of classical music escapes me because I cannot feel the human presence in it, the same for electronica.
Midnight Train to Georgia has that sort of emotive sincerity that I respond to. In the same way I am a closet fan of many of Bruce Springsteen’s rock ballads, a genre I rarely endorse.
I’m not sure I agree with your distinction between music with emotive sincerity and music without, and music with nuance and without. I wouldn’t file these distinctions according to genre.
It might help if we clear up what exactly pop music is. I think most people think pop music is poplar music, though of a particular nature: three minutes, verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge, generally energetic in tone. For me, I’ve always associated pop music as being onomatopoeiatic in derivation: it’s music that goes pop, that on some level is very direct and declarative of its intentions. This doesn’t mean pop music can’t be layered and reward repeated listens with new appreciations, but it does mean that for the first few listens the listener generally focuses on a prominent hook in the song, which serves as the foundation of the song.
I personally find Phil Collins more emotionally sincere than Bob Dylan. Dylan sings in a number of voices on his songs, and often takes on the persona of a wise Oracle dispensing truth through metaphor and imagery. How is this sincere? I find Dylan’s desire to say something intellectuall profound- a desire that is audibly palpable in his music- to be the opposite of emotional sincerity.
Phil Collins, on the other hand, works in the realm of the historic archetypes of romantic love, and though this might be a well-travelled road, he does is so well I find myself, even after all these years, stopping the dial when I hit his songs. It’s like ancient Greek Drama or Shakespeare, where I and everyone know the plot beforehand, and this in no way dilutes my aesthetic appreciation of the art.
As an aside, it’s funny you mention electronic music and classical. Those are two genres I have gravitated to the most in the last few months. I listen to the dance music channel in the car, which is hit and miss, but when a good techno song comes on I feel like my Dionysian taproot has been struck. Classical is a bit harder, because I too have often found it lacking a human quality, but after buying some classic works performed by quartets and trios and given them repeated listens, I’m feeling more of a connection to this very melancholic music. A violin or cello in isolation is very humane and expressive, which is why I’m sticking with the small arrangments for now.
Yeah I admit my prior categorizations were a bit muddled. I do not think there really is a clear division to what constitutes pop music unless you accept some arbitrary point of sales. I mean I would class Scott Walker as pop music and he is hardly ‘pop!’, or upbeat in anyway… but my idea of ‘pop music’ is music which is fairly transparent and immediate. Gilbert and Sullivan is also included in my idea of ‘pop music’, there are shades of panto to it, but not exclusively pantomime. I guess characteristically pop music is simple and immediately accessible, and requires little to no thought to appreciate. It is a broad category that encompasses many genres.
Actually this is a very difficult thing for me to articulate, not least of all because I am at work and being interrupted every five minutes… so I think I will let this one go. I just know there is something qualitatively different between the music I listened to in my teens and the music I listen to now…
I think this is difficult to codify primarily due to the fact that music is not the sum of its parts, but of all the arts it is perhaps the most purely experiential. There is not lyrics and musical accompaniement there is a single sound that yes is layered, but each layer infects the other so that to speak of the lyrics as written words is to do a certain wrong to its actual experienced expression.
I would like to say that pop music is characteristically formulaic, whether it be lyrically or musically and to which extent that the either is the dominating force in the song, but something feels false about that. I would suspect that if a survey was done, and songs were put before a group of people they could effortlessly distinguish which was pop music and which was not, and that taken together there would be a universal consensus on what fit the category… but it is altogether different thing to articulate why. I think it is because it is the totality of musical experience that presses on our understanding, and just as spontaneously some concept of it being pop or not resonates and makes us say ‘this is pop music’. It also depends on our saturation in music, our cache of knowledge about music.
I am a bit surprised how hard this is for me to classify.