In 1999, “Midnight Train to Georgia” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It currently ranks #432 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The song was originally written and performed by Jim Weatherly under the title “Midnight Plane to Houston”, which he recorded 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 with Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney and aunt of singers Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick)… 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, at a program in Nashville, said he was the quarterback at the University of Mississippi, the NFL didn’t work out for him, so he was in LA trying to write songs.

He was in a Rec football league with Lee Majors and called Majors one night. Farrah Fawcett answered the phone and he asked what she was doing. She said she was “taking the midnight plane to Houston” to visit her family.

He thought that was a catchy phrase for a song, and in writing the song, wondered why someone would leave LA on the midnight plane – which brought the idea of a “superstar, but he didn’t get far.”

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.” 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.

Hits: 31

“Smile A Little Smile For Me” was a US hit for The Flying Machine, who were a pop band from the UK. The song is a story of a boy (possibly a love interest or a friend) that is telling a girl named Rose Marie that she needs to get over the boy that has left her. Rose Marie is the same girl from Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” as this was also written by Tony McCaulay, who founded Edison Lighthouse.

Hits: 25

The song has been recorded by at least 20 different artists, in styles ranging from folk to reggae to psychedelic rock. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked it #364 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.

In his memoir, Fogerty said he borrowed the guitar lick for this song from Scotty Moore’s work on Elvis Presley’s “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”.

Fogerty stresses that he wasn’t trying to hide that he’d borrowed the lick and was instead openly “honoring it.” In 1986, at an unspecified awards get-together, Moore grabbed Fogerty from behind and said, “Give me back my licks!”

Fogerty reportedly wrote “Bad Moon Rising” after watching The Devil and Daniel Webster. Inspired by a scene in the film involving a hurricane, Fogerty claims the song is about “the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us”.

“Then I remembered one of my favourite old movies – a black-and-white 1941 film called The Devil And Daniel Webster, shot in that spooky, film noir way they did back then. It’s a classic tale where the main character, who’s down on his luck, meets the Devil and sells his soul to him. The scene I liked is where there’s a devastating hurricane; furniture, trees, houses, everything’s blowing around. That story and that look really stuck in my mind and they were the germ for the song.”

Given the time this was written, the late 60’s, there was a subtext to the meaning of the song:

“I don’t think I was actually saying the world was coming to an end,” Fogerty says, “but the song was a metaphor. I wasn’t just writing about the weather.”

The last line of the chorus, “there’s a bad moon on the rise”, is sometimes misheard as “there’s a bathroom on the right”. Fogerty occasionally sings the misheard lyric in concert.

“In the wonderful tradition of rock‘n’roll,” he explains, “people misconstrue the lyrics, and that’s what they thought I was singing. And when I hear the song on the radio now, I can see why they thought that – it does sound like it could be what I’m singing. So I do it for fun. I’m not one of these people that walks around going: ‘I’m a serious artist.’ I like to have fun.”

Hits: 28

“I Like It Like That” was written and originally recorded by Chris Kenner and co-written by  pianist and arranger Allen Toussaint.

The song was covered by the Dave Clark Five in 1965. Their version charted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The song was recorded by The Nashville Teens (who had a hit with “Tobacco Road”) and also covered by the Kingsmen on their 1965 album “The Kingsmen on Campus”, Brinsley Schwarz on their 1972 album “Nervous on the Road”, and Loggins and Messina on their 1975 album of cover songs, “So Fine”.

Chris Kenner wrote a few other hits, such as “Something You Got” (covered by Wilson Pickett, Alvin Robinson, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Chuck Jackson, Earl Grant, Maxine Brown, Fats Domino, Bobby Womack, The Moody Blues, the American Breed, Fairport Convention, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix,  and “Land of a Thousand Dances” in 1962.

The song was also covered by Danny & the Memories, Ted Nugent, the J. Geils Band.

The song became famous for its “na na na na na” hook, which Cannibal & the Headhunters added in their 1965 version. The “na na na na na” hook happened by accident when Frankie “Cannibal” Garcia, lead singer of Cannibal and the Headhunters, forgot the lyrics. The melody to this section was also created spontaneously, as it is not in Chris Kenner’s original track.

Hits: 47

“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” is a gospel song that has been recorded by many musicians over the years. The first known recording of this song was by American gospel blues musician Blind Willie Johnson in 1927, titled “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine”.

In an interview, Jimmy Page explained:

“Robert Plant came in one day and suggested that we cover it, but the arrangement I came up with was nothing to do with the Blind Willie Johnson original. Robert may have wanted to go for the original blues lyrics, but everything else was a totally different kettle of fish.”

Led Zeppelin biographer George Case adds “Page was likely more mindful of John Renbourn’s 1966 acoustic take than Blind Willie Johnson’s”.

Lyrically, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” has been called “Led Zeppelin’s ‘Hell Hound on My Trail'”, another Robert Johnson 1937 Delta blues song tells of a man trying to stay ahead of the evil which is pursuing him, but it does not address the cause or lasting solution for his predicament.

In Blind Willie Johnson’s “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine”, the problem is clearly stated: he will be doomed, unless he uses his abilities to learn (and presumably live according to) biblical teachings.

Led Zeppelin retain Blind Willie’s admission that he ultimately is to blame, but add Robert Johnson’s sense of despair. However, they shift the focus from religion to one “relevant to the Zeppelin lifestyle of the day”.

Their lyrics include “that monkey on my back”, a commonly used reference to addiction, and “the devil he told me to roll, how to roll the line tonight”; to overcome, Plant concludes “gonna change my ways tonight”. “For Robert [Plant] and perhaps the others, it was a sort of exorcism”.

“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” follows a “call-and-response method of dramatic construction”. Page’s slide guitar intro has been described as like “a supersonic 1970s interpretation of Johnson’s beautiful slide guitar technique”.

Page triple-tracked his guitar intro; playing one guitar an octave higher than the others and using a phaser. Plant adds a blues-style harmonica solo mid-song. Drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones maintain the rhythm of the song, adding some syncopated accents during repetitions of the introductory phrase.

Hits: 93

Merrilee Gunst was born in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in Seattle’s North End, and studied classical piano from a young age. In 1960, she auditioned and became the singer for the Amazing Aztecs, a Seattle-area rock & roll band led by saxophone player Neil Rush, whom she would later marry. The two went on to form Merrilee and Her Men, doing mostly cover versions of pop hits, and then joined rhythm and blues group Tiny Tony and the Statics, whose regional hit “Hey Mrs. Jones”, on the Bolo label, featured Rush’s keyboard playing and vocals.

In 1965, the pair formed Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, who soon became a popular act on the Pacific Northwest’s teen dancehall circuit. A member of the group’s road crew also worked for Paul Revere and the Raiders, and through this connection, Rush was invited to be the opening act on the Raiders’ tour of the southern United States in 1967.

While in Memphis, Tennessee, Raiders lead vocalist Mark Lindsay introduced Rush to record producer Chips Moman, who produced this song. Chip Taylor, actor Jonathan “Jon” Voight’s brother, wrote and composed “Angel of the Morning” and also wrote “Wild Thing” which was released by The Troggs in 1966. This tender ballad is surprisingly virtually the same song as Chip Taylor explained to Mojo magazine September 2008: “I heard some guy playing ‘Wild Thing’ real slow on a guitar. It sounded nice. So I did the same, lifting one of my fingers off a chord to create a suspension”.

According to Kent Kotal at Forgotten Hits, Chip Taylor came up with this song in about 20 minutes:

“After strumming any variety of chords for close to two hours and coming up with nothing, he says the complete lyrics ‘There’ll be no strings to bind your hands, not if my love can’t bind your heart’ flowed out of his mouth.

“His first thought was ‘What is that? That’s beautiful!’ He then thought, ‘Nobody actually TALKS like that!!! Where did those words come from?’ Incredibly, in one sitting, spread out over no more than twenty minutes, he completed the entire song.

He says that during the entire process, he never once thought, ‘I’m gonna say this’ or ‘I’m gonna say that.’ In fact, most of the time he was thinking ‘I don’t even know what this means!’ In his own mind, he feels that he didn’t so much as WRITE this song as that he DREAMED it… the way the lyrics flowed out, meshing perfectly with the series of chords he had been strumming – there just had to be some kind of divine intervention.

‘I write melody and words at the same time and I hum nonsense things until something comes out. So I don’t think about what I want to say… I just let the emotion carry me. In this song, the emotion just totally took over and carried me. It was magic.'”

Evie Sands originally recorded this song in 1967. Her version was doing well, but two weeks after it was released, her record label, Cameo/Parkway, went bankrupt. Chip Taylor was devastated when he found out the label could not promote it or even make more copies of the song. It was one of several close calls for Sands, who never hit it big; she also did the original version of “I Can’t Let Go,” which was later a hit for The Hollies.

It was originally offered to Connie Francis to sing, but she turned it down because she thought that it was too risqué for her career. The song describes feelings about a one-night stand, with the added fact it was from a woman’s point of view. While the ’60s were very permissive in some regards, it was still a taboo subject in the media.

Hits: 64

Randy Bachman started writing this song when he was waiting in the living room at the house of his date, Lorayne Stevenson. She was taking a long time getting ready so Bachman sat at the piano and wrote the beginning of this song. Lorayne – the girl he was waiting for – he later married (they were married for about 10 years and had six children together).

Bachman claims the song took him just 15 minutes to write once he sat down with his bandmate Burton Cummings to put it together. Cummings, a trained Royal Conservatory Of Music pianist, later complimented Randy for devising riffs that were technically wrong but sonically right for the emerging song. With an original title of “These Arms”, Burton Cummings changed the title to “These Eyes” and added the middle eight.

When they weren’t touring, Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings would meet for songwriting sessions on Saturday mornings, and it was at one of these sessions that they completed the song. The band was still struggling at the time, and Cummings was still living with his mother, where these songwriting sessions took place. It turned out to be an enlivening songwriting environment, as the pair composed many of their early songs at Cummings’ mother’s piano.

The Guess Who is one of several bands that had members come and go over the years. The band using that name has had multiple artists, but most notably Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman (who went on to form Bachman–Turner Overdrive).

The Guess Who formed in Winnipeg in 1965. Initially gaining recognition in Canada, the group found international success from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s with many hit singles, including “No Time”, “American Woman”, “Laughing”, “These Eyes”, “Undun” and “Share the Land”. A band using the name has continued to perform and record to the present day.

They started out as a local Winnipeg band formed by singer/guitarist Chad Allan (real name: Allan Kowbel) in 1958 and initially called Allan and the Silvertones. This was changed to Chad Allan and the Reflections in 1962, by which point the band consisted of five Winnipeg-born musicians: Chad Allan (lead vocals/guitar), Bob Ashley (keyboards), Randy Bachman (guitars, backing vocals), Jim Kale (bass, backing vocals), and Garry Peterson (drums, backing vocals). In 1965, the group changed their name to Chad Allan & the Expressions, and later changed to Guess Who? in an attempt to build a mystique. After Quality Records revealed the band to be Chad Allan & The Expressions, disc jockeys continued to announce the group as Guess Who?, effectively forcing the band to accept the new name. The question mark would finally be dropped in 1968.

Burton Cummings (from the Winnipeg group The Deverons) joined the band as keyboardist in early January 1966 and shared lead vocal work with Chad Allan. Chad Allan left in May 1966 to enroll in college, leaving Burton Cummings the full-time lead singer.

Differences between Bachman and Cummings (mainly due to Bachman’s conversion to Mormonism) led Bachman to leave the group after playing a final show at the Fillmore East in New York City on May 16, 1970. Recent studio recordings (eventually released in 1976 as The Way They Were) were sidelined. Bachman returned to Winnipeg and in 1971 formed Brave Belt which evolved into Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Burton Cummings performing a live version:

Hits: 55

The Everly Brothers were a country-influenced duo, known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close harmony singing. They were professionals way before their teens, schooled by their accomplished guitarist father Isaac Milford “Ike” Everly, Jr, and singing with their family on radio broadcasts in Iowa.  Ike Everly had a show on KMA and KFNF in Shenandoah in the mid-1940s, first with his wife and then with their sons. The brothers sang on the radio as “Little Donnie and Baby Boy Phil.” In the mid-’50s, they made a brief stab at conventional Nashville country.

The brothers toured with Buddy Holly in 1957 and 1958. According to Holly’s biographer Philip Norman, they were responsible for persuading Holly and the Crickets to change their outfits from Levi’s and T-shirts to the Everlys’ Ivy League suits. Don said Holly wrote and composed “Wishing” for them. “We were all from the South,” Phil observed of their commonalities. “We’d started in country music.”

In 1966 they recorded an album with the Hollies (who were probably more blatantly influenced by the Everlys than any other British band of the time). The album, “Two Yanks in England“, is  by The Everly Brothers while the backing band on most of the recordings is actually The Hollies, and eight of the twelve songs featured are credited to L. Ransford, the songwriting pseudonym of The Hollies’ Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are also purported to play on the record as session musicians. Also, in a recent interview with Nash on David Dye’s World Cafe, it is claimed Reggie Dwight (a.k.a. Elton John) played on the album.

In the late ’60s, they helped pioneer country-rock with the 1968 album Roots, their most sophisticated and unified full-length statement.

The decades of enforced professional togetherness finally took their toll on the pair in the early ’70s, which saw a few dispirited albums and, finally, an acrimonious breakup in 1973. They spent the next decade performing solo, which only proved — as is so often the case in close-knit artistic partnerships — how much each brother needed the other to sound his best. In 1983, enough water had flowed under the bridge for the two to resume performing and recording together. The tours, with a backup band led by guitarist Albert Lee, proved they could still sing well. The records (both live and studio) were fair efforts that, in the final estimation, were not in nearly the same league as their ’50s and ’60s classics.

Don Everly admitted that he had lived “a very difficult life” with his brother and that he and Phil had become estranged once again in later years, something which was mainly attributed to “their vastly different views on politics and life,” with the music being the one thing they shared closely, saying, “it’s almost like we could read each other’s minds when we sang.”

On January 3, 2014, Phil Everly died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Chet Atkins, a friend of their father Ike, played guitar on this. Atkins, who died of cancer in 2001, was a world-famous musician who created a distinctive sound using a 3-fingered picking technique.

Some Boston radio stations banned this song because of the lyrics, which imply that the young couple spent the night together. At the time, staying out late with a girl was a little controversial.

The song was ranked at #318 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

This was written by the husband and wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote most of The Everly Brothers songs in the ’50s. This was a labor of love for the songwriting duo.

“We persevered with ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ for many hours,” Boudleaux recalled to Country Music People. “I started writing one night, kept trying to get my ideas down, but it just wouldn’t happen. Finally I woke Felice, who took one listen to what I had so far achieved and came up with the final touches that I couldn’t get.

“The Everlys liked the song, but like me had problems with getting it right in the studio. They worked a whole three-hour session on that one song and had to give up, they just couldn’t get it right. We all trooped back to the studio the next day and got it down first take. That’s the way it happens sometimes.”

The story of the Bryants began at an elevator in Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel. It was the spring of 1945 and the elevator operator was 19-year-old Matilda Genevieve Scaduto. While working, she struck up a conversation with a visiting musician from Georgia named Boudleaux Bryant. After five days, Boudleaux and Matilda ran off together.

For the next 30 years, as the husband and wife team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, they went on to become one of the most successful songwriting teams ever. They produced hits for Tony Bennett, Eddy Arnold, Ruth Brown, Roy Orbison, Carl Smith, Charley Pride, Buddy Holly, Jim Reeves, Leo Sayer, Christy Lane, Joe Stampley and Moe Bandy and -- most memorably -- the Everly Brothers. They wrote “Let’s Think About Lovin'” for Bob Luman, and Boudleaux co-wrote “My Last Date” with Skeeter Davis. Boudleaux had an instrumental hit called “Mexico.” There was “Rocky Top” for Buck Owens, “Raining In My Heart” for Buddy Holly and “Love Hurts” for Roy Orbison.

They wrote the songs “Bye Bye Love”,  “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” “Problems,” “Bird Dog,” “Poor Jenny” and “Like Strangers”  for the Everlys as well.

Altogether it’s estimated that the songs of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant have sold 300 million records. The couple has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the National Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The Everly Brothers had 35 Billboard Top-100 singles, 26 in the top 40 and hold the record for the most Top-100 singles by any duo. In 1986, the Everly Brothers were among the first 10 artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were introduced by Neil Young, who observed that every musical group he had ever belonged to had tried, and failed, to copy the Everly Brothers’ harmonies. The brothers were inducted into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. In 1997, they were awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2004.

Ed Note: The Grateful Dead did a version of this song, as well.

Hits: 31

“Happy Together” is a 1967 song from the Turtles’ album of the same name.  Despite what the title implies, this is not a song about a couple in love. According to Gary Bonner, who wrote the song with Alan Gordon, the song is about unrequited love. Our desperate singer wants the girl to “Imagine how the world could be so very fine,” proposing what would happen “If I should call you up.” The line in the fadeout, “How is the weather?” is when he realizes they will never be more than passing acquaintances, and he resorts to small talk to keep from bursting into tears.

The Turtles were formed by Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan in 1965 in Westchester, Los Angeles, originally a surf-rock group called the Crossfires. Adhering to the prevailing musical trend, they rebranded themselves as a folk rock group under the name The Tyrtles. Volman and Kaylan were saxophone players who did whatever was trendy in order to make a living as musicians. They played surf-rock, acoustic folk, whatever was big at the time, and in addition to their own bands, played backup for The Coasters, Sonny And Cher, and The Righteous Brothers. After a while, they gave up sax and became singers, signing a deal with White Whale Records as The Crosswind Singers, which included Al Nichol, Chuck Portz, Don Murray, and Jim Tucker.

When British groups like The Beatles took over America, they tried to pass themselves off as British singers and renamed themselves The Tyrtles. The record company made them change the name to The Turtles, and tried to make them sound like The Byrds, who were leaders of the folk-rock trend. Like The Byrds had done before, The Turtles recorded a Bob Dylan song for their first single – “It Ain’t Be Babe.” They had a few more minor hits, and recorded the original version of “Eve Of Destruction,” which became a #1 hit for Barry McGuire.

They recorded some gloomy songs that completely flopped, so they decided to try some happier songs. After many other artists passed on “Happy Together,” The Turtles decided to record it in an effort to change their image once again. The song had been rejected a dozen times before it was offered to the Turtles, and the demo acetate was worn out.

The song’s composers Gary (sometimes spelled Garry) Bonner and Alan Gordon were the bass player and drummer of the Boston area group The Magicians. Gordon, who died in 2008 at the age of 64, had songs recorded by Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa and The Lovin’ Spoonful. Bonner and Gordon also wrote other Turtles hits like “She’d Rather Be With Me” as well as “Celebrate” by Three Dog Night.

Talking about how the song came together, Alan Gordon said:

“I had nearly half a song already written, mostly lyric ideas, but couldn’t find the right melodic concept. The Magicians were in the middle of a week-long engagement at the Unicorn Club in Boston, and one early morning I was visiting my divorced father in nearby Ayer, Massachusetts after being up all night. I had stopped to have breakfast at the Park Street Diner in the town and was miserable with no sleep, the endless dumb gigs we were playing and having a songwriter’s block. About the only melody that was throbbing in my tired, fried brain at that hour was the time-immemorial repeated open string pattern that Allen (Jake) Jacobs, the Magician’s lead guitarist, would use as he incessantly tuned and retuned after, before, and frequently during each piece we played. Suddenly, some words began to fit and literally minutes later music and lyrics started to take shape. I excitedly and in fairness asked Jake to complete the song with me as co-writer, but he refused, saying it was all ‘too simple’ for him to be involved, so my regular partner Gary then helped me with the finishing touches. When Gary Klein at the Koppleman/Rubin office heard the result, he immediately knew the song would be perfect for the new and upbeat image being created for The Turtles, and it was his continued enthusiasm that convinced the group to record it.”

After the song was turned down by a number of groups, Bonner and Gordon recorded a demo at Regent Sound Studio with some session musicians, including guitarist Ralph Casale and bassist Dick Romoff. It was Casale who came up with the main figure which set the groove for the song:

“A chord sheet was placed in front of the musicians and we immediately proceeded to put this song together. I came up with what I considered and called a Lovin’ Spoonful feel. I created the figure and all the other musicians including Bonner and Gordon immediately understood the direction. The vocal arrangements fell into place very nicely. Regent Sound was an excellent studio so the demo sounded like a finished product. I later told everybody, ‘I just heard a hit record.’ As Aunt Flo put it, the original demo was phenomenal. In fact the Turtles’ recording sounds as though they used the basic demo track and overdubbed horns. The Bonner/Gordon vocal arrangement sounded a lot like the hit record also.”

Released as a single in February 1967 by The Turtles, the song knocked The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” out of the number one slot for three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.

In the three years after The Turtles recorded this, they had several other hits, but disbanded in 1970. Volman and Kaylan joined Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention as “Phlorescent Leech and Eddie.” After a few years with Zappa, they started recording as Flo And Eddie. They wrote music for the animated movies Dirty Duck, Strawberry Shortcake and The Care Bears, and hosted their own nationally syndicated radio show. They also played on many famous songs by John Lennon, Roger McGuinn, Hoyt Axton, Alice Cooper, Blondie, Bruce Springsteen, The Psychedelic Furs, Sammy Hagar, Duran Duran, and The Ramones. In 1984, they went on their “Happy Together Tour” as The Turtles Featuring Flo And Eddie.

Ed Note: I actually thought this was a Beatles song! Oops!

Hits: 77