There are good reasons to leave Georgia. There are just as many to return.
There is something about Georgia that makes people, time after time, want to come back.
Whether it’s the trees, the people or the weather, for decades American musicians have been singing about coming home to Georgia.
Jim Croce was “Walkin’ Back to Georgia.” Gladys Knight & the Pips boarded the “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Bad Company cried “Oh, Atlanta.” Loggins and Messina were headed “Back to Georgia.” Nanci Griffith and Adam Duritz were “Going Back to Georgia.” Tom Petty was “Drivin’ Down to Georgia.”
The list goes on. Dean Martin wondered whether he would ever get back to Georgia. Head East wanted a “Ticket Back to Georgia.” Johnny Adams gazed out over Los Angeles, remembered the “Georgia Morning Dew” and decided it was time to head home.
Different decades. Different genres. Different Georgias, undoubtedly. But the same gravitational pull.
As a recent graduate, this idea feels especially worth remembering now.
Ambitious people are supposed to leave, but there’s another path
For ambitious young people, particularly those graduating from our prominent universities and entering professional careers, success can seem to have a geography. I have felt that pressure myself.
The ambitious graduate is supposed to head north — or perhaps west — to New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago or Los Angeles. You collect degrees and promotions and increasingly expensive apartments. Leaving home becomes evidence that you are going somewhere. I understand the appeal. There is enormous value in leaving the place you know, meeting people unlike yourself and discovering how large the world is.
But somewhere along the way, we have allowed leaving to become confused with succeeding — and returning with retreat.
Georgia’s great songbook suggests another possibility.
In “Midnight Train to Georgia,” the man at the center of the song gives up his Hollywood dreams and returns home. By the standards we sometimes impose on young people today, he has failed. He went out into the wider world, did not become what he intended to become and came home.
Yet that is not how the song feels.
There is dignity in the return. There is love in it. Most importantly, there is the recognition that a life does not become smaller simply because it brings you home.
That lesson matters in modern Georgia.
Atlanta is a destination for ambitious young professionals, not a place they must leave. Georgia is a place where companies are built, films are made, music is recorded, technology is developed and people from around the world come to build their lives. The old bargain — that serious ambition requires a one-way ticket elsewhere — makes less sense than it ever has.
And Georgia offers something harder to put on a résumé.
It offers Sunday lunch and summer thunderstorms. Mountains to the north and wild barrier islands to the south. Roadside peaches, pines and kudzu. Athens on a Saturday in the fall and lake weekends in the summer. Atlanta neighborhoods where the skyline disappears behind trees. Family close enough for dinner. Old friends who remember you before your job title.
The Peach State is the place waiting at the end of the journey
None of this means everyone should stay. Sometimes leaving Georgia is exactly the right thing to do. Go see New York. Take the job in Boston. Study in Chicago. Cross an ocean.
But do not mistake distance for progress.
And if, after a few years, that old Georgia gravity begins tugging at you, do not mistake the journey south for going backward either.
Maybe that is what all those musicians understood.
For more than half a century, they have walked back, driven back, bought tickets back and caught midnight trains back. Again and again, Georgia appears not as the place the protagonist must escape, but as the place waiting at the end of the journey.
There will always be good reasons to leave Georgia. But there are just as many reasons to return.
After all, going somewhere in life and going home were never opposites.
Sometimes, they are the same journey.
Hear the songs behind this piece, along with more music about finding your way back to Georgia, in the playlist below.
Lewis Sinclair is an Atlanta native and recent University of Georgia history graduate. He currently works as a copywriter at BCG BrightHouse and is working to keep Georgia history alive through his curated antique booths at Motherlode Atlanta and Motherlode Athens.
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