Play music loud in their Monte Carlos, holding back the tears, relieved they’re not in the places left behind.ĭanyel Smith is the host of the Spotify Original show “Black Girl Songbook” and author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.Family group led by Gladys Knight. And trim hedges in whatever shape they chose. Or to just send their kids to good public schools. They came to make music and politics and movies and money and to be front and center in the American machine. streets with optimistic names like Hi Point after a bad time elsewhere. The son of Texas sharecroppers and UCLA classmate of Jackie Robinson, Tom Bradley was rallying a multiracial coalition to become the first Black mayor of a big American city with a majority-white population.īlack folks migrated to the City of Angels for creative freedom, and for plain old freedom. Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and what felt like all of Motown had moved to L.A. Stars like Diahann Carroll lived in Los Angeles. Camillo looked to Ed Stasium to mix and engineer “Midnight Train.” Stasium was 22, and his tastes back then ran to Sinatra, Ella, Basie, Bing Crosby and Nat Cole. According to Weatherly, Neil Bogart called in producer Tony Camillo to record and arrange. They’d already recorded his “ Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” to much success. ![]() Weatherly then sent the song to Gladys and the Pips. Cissy recorded Weatherly’s song but changed “plane” to “train.” The destination was changed, by Houston, to “Georgia,” and Cissy says she recorded the song with “a country-gospel thing going.” But there was no buzz on it. Then, he said in 2013, “I filed away the song.” Two years later, he sent a recorded version to Cissy Houston. Weatherly says he jumped off the phone and wrote the music and lyrics to “Midnight Plane to Houston” in about 45 minutes. About to get on a midnight plane to Houston. What was Farrah doing? Packing to visit her parents, she said. This conversation is the origin of Gladys Knight & the Pips’ definitive song. This was about five years before he became the TV astronaut Steve Austin, when Majors was starring as moody Heath Barkley on “The Big Valley.” Fawcett told Weatherly that Majors wasn’t in. Fawcett was married to Lee Majors, who was on a flag football team with Weatherly. It was the late 1960s, and songwriter Jim Weatherly, known for penning great country records, was on the phone with pre–”Charlie’s Angels” Farrah Fawcett. Her dismay is mistaken for and embraced by the masses as Black joy. Knight sings about Black people in the scattered pictures of American history. Can it be that it was all so simple then? No. 3 pop hit, Gladys Knight sings out all that misty dissonance. On her way - unofficially by herself - to a No. She goes on to convey the complexity of “the way” so many Black people in America “were” forced to be, and our complex relationship with the past. And then, blues: Come to think about it / As bad as we think they are / These will become the good old days of our children. Why don’t we try to remember / That kind of September / When life was sloooooow: So goes Knight’s introduction, elocuted with Sunday-grace pacing. Take, for example, her 1974 live recording of “ The Way We Were/Try to Remember,” when she remakes Barbra Streisand’s Academy Award–winning version. The joke is on who? The woman who led her crew into immortality? One camera breaks wide to capture costumes and choreography, and another focuses closely on what would be Gladys - a standing microphone. The real Bubba, William and Edward, in high spirits, go into a couple of GK&TP songs, beautifully doing absolutely only their background vocals. The funny is in the ampersand, right? In the precision with which Knight is clipped. In the video he looks as if he might come out from under that bolero. The earnest emotional surge of Knight’s voice and body language give John permission to get grimy. ![]() But it’s Knight who rolls into its last third, infused with the holiness of giving back (the song raised near $2 million for AIDS research) and the convergence of talent by which she is surrounded. One of the most transcendent pop records of all time, 1985’s “ That’s What Friends Are For,” stars Dionne Warwick, and features Stevie Wonder (on harmonica as well as vocals) and Elton John. But it is equally because though she has sold millions of records, toured globally, been nominated by her peers for 22 Grammys and won 7, and was inducted in 1996 into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - Gladys is almost always a part of a group or collaboration. Part of this is because she came of age in the shadow of Diana Ross, whose anime eyes had seduced the world. ![]() Even in her glowing, tiny-waisted, full-throated prime, Gladys Knight was underrated.
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