Songfacts®:

• "Oh Atlanta" was written and sung by Little Feat's keyboard player, Bill Payne. The song finds him yearning to be in Atlanta with a red-haired girl who sets his heart on fire. According to the book Willin': The Story of Little Feat by Ben Fong-Torres, it was inspired by a girl he met in the city.
• The opening lines find Payne doing some plane-watching:
  
  They got a place down Kentucky
  Right down near Ohio
  Where you can watch the planes at night
  People line up to watch each flight
  
  He got this idea from being in the Cincinnati airport, watching the planes come and go.
• Little Feat was led at the time by guitarist Lowell George, who wrote most of the songs and produced the Feats Don't Fail Me Now album. Other members of the group were also strong songwriters, and they could get competitive in their songwriting. Bill Payne credited George for pushing him to write "Oh Atlanta."
  
  "We affected each other, we pushed each other, and it was that type of camaraderie that produced the music," he said in Mojo. "Lowell would say, 'You can't write a commercial song like that.' And I'd say, 'Yes, you can.' And he'd say, 'No, you can't.' And the result of that was 'Oh Atlanta.'"
• Little Feat was scattered to the winds and in dire straits before "Oh Atlanta" and the Feats Don't Fail Me Now album bought them new life. They had released three albums, none of which sold very well, and the band had split up to work as session players (Payne with The Doobie Brothers). Their record company, Warner Bros., was loath to pay for them to make another album, but one of their managers found a great studio at a great price: Blue Seas Recording Studio in Hunts Valley, Maryland, which had just opened. The studio needed a band to record there to work out the kinks, so they let Little Feat use it for $5,000 a month. It was also far away from their base in Los Angeles, which kept them clear of certain temptations Lowell George was prone to, like cocaine and women. They made a great-sounding album that exceeded expectations when it was released, selling over 500,000 copies and getting the group back in the good graces of Warners. "Oh Atlanta" was released as the first single and became one of their most popular songs.
• This is one of many Little Feat that plays like a travelogue, with various cities mentioned. "Feats Don't Fail Me Now" and "Willin'" are trucking adventures, and "Skin It Back" finds them all over America, including Georgia.
• Soon after the Feats Don't Fail Me Now album, Lowell George started to deteriorate from drug addiction and hepatitis. The rest of the band assumed more control, and the three studio albums they made before George died from a heart attack in 1979 were modestly successful. Their best selling album was the live set Waiting For Columbus, which includes "Oh Atlanta." That one was recorded at four different shows in London in 1977 and released in 1978.
• Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris both sang backup on this track; Harris covered it on her 1981 album Evangeline.