"Midnight Train to Georgia" is a 1973 number-one hit single by Gladys Knight & the Pips, their second release after departing Motown Records for Buddah Records. Written by Jim Weatherly, and included on the Pips' 1973 LP Imagination, "Midnight Train to Georgia" won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal Performance By A Duo, Group Or Chorus and has become Knight's signature song.

The theme of the song is how romantic love can conquer differences in background. The boyfriend of the song's narrator is a failed musician who left his native Georgia to move to Los Angeles to become a "superstar, but he didn't get far". He decides to give up, and "go back to the life he once knew." Despite the fact that she's settled and secure in herself, the narrator decides to move to Georgia with him:

The song was originally recorded by singer Cissy Houston, and released as a single a year earlier. Jim Weatherly had recorded one of his own songs, "Midnight Plane to Houston," on Jimmy Bowen's Amos Records. "It was based on a conversation I had with somebody... about taking a midnight plane to Houston," Weatherly recalls. "I wrote it as a kind of a country song. Then we sent the song to a guy named Sonny Limbo in Atlanta and he wanted to cut it on Cissy Houston... he asked if I minded if he changed the title to 'Midnight Train to Georgia.' And I said, I don't mind. Just don't change the rest of the song.'" Weatherly told Songfacts that the phone coversation was with Farrah Fawcett and he used Fawcett and his friend Lee Majors who she'd just started dating, "as kind of like characters." Cissy Houston took Weatherly's song into the R&B chart. Her version can be found on the CD Midnight Train to Georgia: The Janus Years. Also, Weatherly's version began with "Nashville (not L.A.) proved too much for the man."

Weatherly's publisher forwarded the song to Gladys Knight and the Pips, who followed Houston's lead and kept the title "Midnight Train to Georgia." Their second single for Buddah, it debuted on the Hot 100 at number seventy-one and became the group's first number-one hit eight weeks later, as well as reaching number one on the soul singles chart, their fifth on that chart. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number ten.

"Midnight Train to Georgia" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Rolling Stoneranked it #432 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

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 Los Angeles to realize the dream of being in motion pictures or music, but then fail to realize that dream and plunge into despair.

The song was featured during a scene in the 1978 film The Deer Hunterby director Michael Cimino, in which the character Michael (Robert DeNiro) searches for his friend Nick (Christopher Walken) in a strip club in Saigon as the girls gyrate to "Midnight Train To Georgia". The song was also featured in the episode "Episode 210" of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock.

Initial track recorded at Venture Sound Studios, Hillsborough, New Jersey, 1973:

Overdubs recorded at Venture Sound Studios: