At 8, She Won a TV Talent Show. Then Gladys Knight Took a “Midnight Train” All the Way to No. 1

Gladys Knight was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1944, and she started singing gospel in church when she was just four years old.

At eight, she won Ted Mack’s “The Original Amateur Hour” on TV, singing Nat King Cole’s “Too Young.”

Soon after, she started singing with her brother Merald “Bubba” Knight and their cousins. They called themselves the Pips, after a cousin nicknamed “Pip” who managed them.

Their biggest song started out as something else entirely. Songwriter Jim Weatherly wrote it as a country tune called “Midnight Plane to Houston,” after a phone call with Farrah Fawcett, who told him she was taking the midnight plane to Houston to see her family.

Cissy Houston recorded it first and changed the title to “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Then it came to Gladys and the Pips.

Gladys made it her own. The song tells of a man who went to Los Angeles to be a star but “didn’t get far,” and of the woman who loves him enough to go home with him.

On October 27, 1973, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the group’s first ever. It stayed there for two weeks, and in 1974 it won a Grammy.

In this video, from The Midnight Special in March 1974, Gladys sings it in red while the Pips, in matching blue suits, answer every line.

Watch her face near the end. She is not just singing that song. She is living it.

Today it is in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and Gladys is still called the “Empress of Soul.”

Did you ever see Gladys Knight & the Pips live? Tell us in the comments.