Midnight Train to Georgia

If I could sing – which I cant, and if I went to Karaoke nights, which I avoid like kebabs dropped on the pavement, my chosen song would be Midnight Train to Georgia. It’s a song I have always loved and which, my own efforts excluded, seems impossible to sing badly.

I have tried to work out why I like it. The words and music fut well together. It mentions trains – a good start. Trains are big in blues music. Lovers are always leaving on trains – and usually at midnight. In this song, it’s almost cinematic. A tragic love story about a character whose dreams and ambitions have failed in L.A. and has to return home, metaphorical tail between legs, but whose partner will stay with them.

Here are the lyrics - with all the backing vocals  and repetitions stripped out.

Mmmm L.A
Proved too much for the man
So he's leavin' the life he's come to know
He said he's goin' back to find
Ooh ooh ooh what's left of his world
The world he left behind
Not so long ago

He's leaving
On that midnight train to Georgia
Said he's goin' back
To a simpler place and time
Oh yes he is

And I'll be with him
On that midnight train to Georgia
I 'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine

He kept dreamin' 
Ooh that someday he'd be a star
 But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don't always come true
Oh no! ah ah 

So he pawned all his hopes
And he even sold his old car
Bought a one way ticket back
To the life he once knew
Oh yes he did

He said he would
Oh oh he's leavin 
On that midnight train to Georgia

What else do we learn? He's from Georgia originally and has only been in LA for a short time. And now he is returning empty handed, but with the narrator. So much story in a few lines! And those lines "
I 'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine"!

 The “classic” version is by Gladys Knight and the Pips. It is a version that has aged well and still sends shivers up the spine. It’s the one that everyone knows – and is one of the great soul classics. The structure of the song and the arrangement are great. The backing vocals - rather than the usual filling in and repletion add to the story and push it along. 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 L.A. to pursue their dreams, but then fail to realise that dream and plunge into despair.

I decided to look further though – the song doesn’t sound like the other popular soul songs of the period – it is richer in context and has so much implied story line – and is different from her other songs.

Gladys Knight’s version is in fact a cover version. It is a copy of one by Cissy Houston (now more famous for being Whitney’s mother – but recognised at the time a great singer in her own right and a backing singer on countless major hits).

But, dig deeper.

Cissy Houston’s version is also a cover. But with a few words changed. The original song is by Jim Weatherly, a country and western singer. It was originally titled “Midnight Plane to Houston” – but soul singers in that era didn’t get planes – and Georgia is more soulful place! And it is based on real people. The person heading for that midnight plane was Farrah Fawcett – whose hair inspired a million girls in the 70s and whose poster adorned a similar number of male walls. And the partner is Lee Major, the 6 million dollar man.

Vino Griego

Vino Griego is a song that is very popular in the South West of France, just across the border with Spain. It can be sung as a languid lovesong or as anthem in a packed rugby ground. I first heard the song at a festival, a feria, in Dax, in that region of France. It was in a bullring utilised as a concert venue, packed to capacity with 5,000 spectators, all dressed in white with red sashes, holding red bandanas over their heads, singing and swaying along to the massed brass bands. The crowd united as one to sing the song with, in some cases, pastis inspired tears of joy running down their faces.  I’m not sure whether the song is loved for the melody – ideal for the local brass dominated bands - or the sentimental lyrics about a Greek exile connecting with his homeland by means of the wine. The enthusiastic way the audiences sing the song – I think it’s the lyrics. Like the Greek protagonist, everyone has within them a lost village of youth.  And in France, a natural way to feel this connection is with wine or food.

 

I would recommend watching crowds sing it on Youtube – there are many wobbly videos of happy drunken audiences swaying along. Its hard to think of a UK equivalent – the song is inclusive. The ones that come to mind in this country are laden with political or other baggage – think of “Land of Hope and Glory” at the Proms – or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at Anfield. They are excluding rather than including. I then thought of the song Caledonia – as used for Tennent’s lager advert – when the hero returns from London because he is missing the lager. A far-fetched tale, I always thought. And that reminded me of my cousin. He flew back to Scotland from Australia to be at the death bed of his estranged father. After the funeral, he went for a pint in the “Cri”, his old local. As he stood there, in his familiar spot, surrounded by the drinking buddies of his youth, he took a sip of the ice cold lager and smiled round the room. “You know,” he said, “when I look around and see all the old faces and taste this lager, I think to myself “when you decided to leave this place and these people – it was the smartest thing you ever did!””

It was already late in the cold night of the big city.
I was returning home when suddenly
I saw light in a bar.
I didn't hesitate, it was cold, I went in.
I felt like I was suddenly in another country.
Those people, that music, new to me.
An old man approached me and he spoke to me.

Come drink a toast
with Greek wine from my homeland.
The red wine that will make me remember
a white village of the sea that I left behind.

Come drink a toast
with Greek wine and I'll sing you
old songs that make us dream
about the moment we return home.

They talked to me of the day that they had to leave,
of how fathers, brothers, and girlfriends stayed there
and there's where all their hearts stayed.
Perhaps one day fortune will come to smile on them.
Soon no one will remember they were here
and return to the white village, to home.

Come drink a toast
with Greek wine from my homeland.
The red wine that will make me remember
a white village of the sea that I left behind.

Come drink a toast
with Greek wine and I'll sing you
old songs that make us dream
about the moment we return home.

Carnival

Ask any Glaswegian of my generation, “What’s the carnival?” and they won’t mention masked romances in Venice or drums and dancers in Rio de Janiero. Instead, they will go misty-eyed and talk about the Kelvin Hall, the circus and the heady aroma of candy floss mixed with elephant urine.

It was an annual pilgrimage made by countless thousands of Glaswegian youngsters, usually accompanied by a stoic parent or grandparent. You were hurried through the inevitable turn of the year rain from bus stop, tram stop or subway station. Then, at the entrance, you paid your entrance fee to a cheery green uniformed lady at a line of turnstiles resembling cinema kiosks. Then the door opened and you entered a different world. You were met with a wave of warm noise. The temperature inside was tropical. There was the sound and smell of machinery and the joyous screaming from the scarier rides. It was a world of colourful cacophony. Of everything forbidden in day to day life. Everything that mothers hated. Cheap sweets, hot dogs and candy floss. Toffee apples were the closest it came to health food.

Some games demanded impossible skill – like “throw the table tennis ball in the bucket”. They always bounced out. And there were the scary rides – like the roller coaster that nearly touched the ceiling. There was one famous ride called the Rotor. It always had a packed spectator gallery. It resembled a huge spin dryer. People stood at the perimeter as it spun faster and faster – then the bottom dropped – leaving them stuck to the wall with centrifugal force. There was usually at least one fat person who slid slowly down the wall to the amusement of the spectators heckling from the gallery.

 

It was a world of colour and aroma and danger, far removed from the cold dreich grey world of early 60s Glasgow. This was the Glaswegian Carnival.

So, when I first heard the song “The Carnival is Over” my interpretation was rather different from that envisaged by Tom Springfield, the lyricist.

As I saw it, there is a relationship between two people working at the Kelvin Hall carnival. The woman who sang the song sounded and looked like one of the green uniformed women at the turnstiles. The man I considered to be one of the cool young men who collected the money then burled the waltzers, stepping on and off the whirling platform with a nonchalant swagger. They always seemed popular with teenage girls. I pictured the pair meeting during a cigarette break – there always seemed to be a scrum of workers smoking at the side entrance on Bunhouse Road.

The Carnival always ended in January. So, they were parting, as the stalls and rides were being packed up into the huge lorries and disappearing off to new pastures. They may never meet again. The waltzers might not come back next year or she might be working elsewhere for the corporation.

Maybe some of the larger items were transported by sea. The Kelvin Hall was then  close to Glasgow Harbour - where the Kelvin flows into the Clyde. Hence the harbour lights.

She shows a mature courage and accepts the inevitability of their parting. His views on the matter are unclear. Perhaps he is heartbroken – or maybe he is relieved at his escape.

Listening to it now, it is still a tremendous record. It seems the perfect match of tune (a Russian folk song), lyrics, a well worked arrangement and a perfect performance. There is a quiet nobility in Judith Durham’s voice – a restraint that adds a dignified emotion to the song.

My horizons have since broadened. I now know of other carnivalsaround the world, like New Orleans, Sydney, Notting Hill and Rio.. And who is to say that the song is about a relationship between a man and a woman. And listening again – perhaps the pudding is being over-egged about so brief a liaison. But, still, whenever I hear the opening notes, I picture the star-crossed lovers standing outside the Kelvin Hall, on a rainy January night, looking over towards the Art Galleries and the University tower.