A broken record player at a birthday party launched Gladys Knight and the Pips
When the record player failed at her brother Bubba's tenth birthday, young Gladys Knight, her siblings and cousins sang instead. Her mother urged them to keep going, and the group took its name from a cousin nicknamed Pip. Decades later the Empress of Soul held seven Grammys and a Kennedy Center Honor.
Knight was born in Atlanta in 1944 to a nurse's aide and a postal worker who both sang in choirs. She started singing gospel at four at Mount Moriah Baptist Church and at eight won a national television talent contest with Nat King Cole's Too Young. The Pips signed with Brunswick in 1957, and their first album appeared in 1960, when she was just 16, by which point Every Beat of My Heart had already been a hit.
Motown took them on in 1966 with only three hits behind them and at first treated them as a second-tier act. Their version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine went to number one in 1967, before Marvin Gaye's more famous recording. Opening for Diana Ross and the Supremes proved short-lived; in her memoirs Knight says Ross had them dropped because audiences responded too warmly to the support act.
Leaving for Buddah Records in 1973 paid off at once. Midnight Train to Georgia topped both the pop and R&B charts and won a Grammy, and the group found a devoted following in Britain, where that single reached the top five in 1976, three years after its American run. Legal disputes forced Knight and the Pips to record apart for a time in the late 1970s, but they regrouped and scored again in 1983 with Save the Overtime (For Me), whose video was among the first R&B clips to borrow from hip hop culture.
The Pips retired after a 1988 tour, and Knight's solo work included the title song for the Bond film Licence to Kill and the 1985 charity single That's What Friends Are For with Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder and Elton John. She launched a British farewell tour in 2009, then kept returning to play there for years afterwards.
Source: Gladys Knight
