"Midnight Rider" is a song by the American rock band the Allman Brothers Band. It was the second single from their second studio album, Idlewild South (1970), released on Capricorn Records. The song was primarily written by vocalist Gregg Allman, who first began composing it at a rented cabin outside of Macon, Georgia. He enlisted the help of roadie Kim Payne to complete the song's lyrics. He and Payne broke into Capricorn Sound Studios to complete a demo of the song.

While the original Allman Brothers release of the song did not chart, "Midnight Rider" was much more successful in cover versions. Joe Cocker's solo version of the song, released in 1972, and with different words in the verses, was its biggest billboard pop chart success; it was a top 27 hit in the U.S. and Canada. A cover by Jamaican singer, Paul Davidson, represented its biggest peak in the United Kingdom, where it hit number ten. Country artist Willie Nelson also recorded a version of the song that peaked at number six on U.S. country charts.

"Midnight Rider" originated during the group's time spent at Idlewild South, a $165-a-month farmhouse they rented on a lake outside of Macon, Georgia. Allman felt free to smoke marijuana with no police around, which contributed to his writing at the cabin. Its genesis was quick: the song came to him out of nowhere, and he completed a rough draft in just over an hour of writing. He found himself stuck on the song's third verse, which he regarded as an especially important component of the song: "it's kind of the epilogue to the whole thing," he later wrote. In the middle of the night, he went to roadie Kim Payne, who was keeping watch over the band's warehouse, where they kept their equipment. Payne helped him write the first two lines of the third verse: "We were getting high and, honestly, he was starting to irritate me—because he was singing this song over and over and I got sick of hearing the band play the same shit over and over again until they got it right," he later recalled. "So I just threw out the line, 'I've gone past the point of caring / some old bed I’ll soon be sharing.'"

...
Wikipedia