Though the group felt they were not given the support they deserved at Motown, Gladys puts it like this, “We eventually got what we came for.” And that would be hit records, dates at the top venues and household recognition. In 1966 Gladys Knight and The Pips signed a contract with Motown Records. Brother Bubba (Merald Knight), Cousin Ed (Edward Patten) and Cousin Red (William Guest) became a spinning, dipping, quickstepping, harmony machine that was the envy of other acts on the “chitlin’ circuit.” The hits may have been in short supply but a razor-sharp live show kept the gigs coming. Working with vocal coach Maurice King and choreographer Cholly Atkins, the remaining quartet continued honing their skills. By 1965 cousin Eleanor and sister Brenda had dropped out of the group.
Such are “the going ups and the coming downs” of the music business. Gladys was only sixteen-years-old but vocally she was all woman. The first taste of recording success was the #1 R&B single from 1961, “Every Beat Of My Heart”. Check also this post about Bill Lowery and Ray Charles. So they named themselves after their cousin and manager James “Pip” Woods. As for a name, “We thought of all kinds of flowers and things, but nothing seemed to catch everybody’s fancy,” Gladys has said. A singing group was formed a few years later comprised of Gladys, her brother, her sister and several cousins. Eight-year-old Gladys eventually won the $2,000 Grand Prize in 1952.
#Gladys knight young tv#
Elizabeth Knight arranged to have her audition for the popular Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour TV program. At age four, Gladys was touring Atlanta, GA, as a soloist. She has said that her late mother Elizabeth felt that she had a gift. Like many soul-singers, Gladys began performing in a Baptist church. She fills those three syllables with more meaning than some vocalists put into whole songs. Just a few bars into her rendition of “I Will Survive” she delivers the line ‘I learned how…to get along’ and then draws spontaneous applause by simply intoning ‘Ooo-ooo-ooo’.
What counts is the ability to make a listener feel something. As Gladys herself has noted, those aren’t the most important things. She’s not given to elaborate melisma embellishments or frequent falsetto flourishes. Gladys’ voice doesn’t scale the highest heights. Gladys’ answer to the question of her endurance was, “Well, I know somebody.” the implication, of course, was that her faith and relationship with God had brought her this mighty long way. In the annals of rock and soul music, she was one of a select few. So check out this tribute to a Soul Legend – Gladys Knight. Yet here she stood, so many decades later, still recording, still packing theaters year round and still sending folks home happy. Gladys was a middle-aged woman who cut her first record in 1958–when television was relatively new. In the mid-1990s, while touring to support her ‘Just For You’ CD, Gladys Knight would say to her audiences, “I know a lot of the young artists look at me and wonder, ‘What you still doin’ here?'”.
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