I've recently watched, a number of times, a video from the music-oriented late-night TV program The Midnight Special. The show aired on NBC on Friday nights (actually, early Saturday mornings) from February of 1973 until May of 1981. (I have found that I tend to latch onto certain videos on YouTube--come
across a video I like a great deal, and return to it repeatedly, over a
period of weeks, or months.)
The video I've been watching is from March of 1974--fifty years ago last month--and is of Gladys Knight and the Pips singing "Midnight Train to Georgia." The group recorded and released the song in 1973, and it became a number-one hit; the record received a Grammy Award in 1974. (I was in my last year of high school when the 1974 Midnight Special episode aired, and don't remember if I saw it at the time, but I watched the program often.)
Gladys Knight's singing, in the video, is rich and beautiful (and the Pips, as always, provide very enjoyable accompaniment). There are a couple of moments in the performance during which Ms. Knight looks directly into the camera, and those moments have an appealingly intimate feeling to them. I also enjoy how Ms. Knight makes her exit at the song's conclusion, followed by the exiting of the Pips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jboC9-nL0WA
In that this blog focuses often on early television, but also on a concurrent period, the time when the big band era was coming to a close, the following is another song about trains, from bandleader Kay Kyser's orchestra. It was recorded during the time my late mother sang on Mr. Kyser's 1949-1950 NBC-TV program, the College of Musical Knowledge. The record, "Let's Choo Choo Choo To Idaho," was released on the Columbia label, and featured my mother and the vocal group The Campus Kids.
The song was from the 1950 movie Duchess of Idaho, where it was sung by the former Tommy Dorsey vocalist Connie Haines, accompanied by other performers in the film. Ms. Haines also released a recording of the song, joined by a vocal group.
Other versions of "Let's Choo Choo Choo to Idaho," also released in 1950, included one by Phil Harris, and another by the Charlie Spivak Orchestra. The Kay Kyser version, below, was recorded in February of 1950, a month before my mother turned twenty-two. My parents, at the time, had been married for six months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axCTI5WqYHY
Here, too, is the recording by Connie Haines:
