Her dismay is mistaken for and embraced by the masses as Black joy. Knight sings about Black people in the scattered pictures of American history. Can it be that it was all so simple then? No. 3 pop hit, Gladys Knight sings out all that misty dissonance. On her way - unofficially by herself - to a No. She goes on to convey the complexity of “the way” so many Black people in America “were” forced to be, and our complex relationship with the past. And then, blues: Come to think about it / As bad as we think they are / These will become the good old days of our children.
Why don’t we try to remember / That kind of September / When life was sloooooow: So goes Knight’s introduction, elocuted with Sunday-grace pacing. Take, for example, her 1974 live recording of “ The Way We Were/Try to Remember,” when she remakes Barbra Streisand’s Academy Award–winning version. The joke is on who? The woman who led her crew into immortality? One camera breaks wide to capture costumes and choreography, and another focuses closely on what would be Gladys - a standing microphone. The real Bubba, William and Edward, in high spirits, go into a couple of GK&TP songs, beautifully doing absolutely only their background vocals. The funny is in the ampersand, right? In the precision with which Knight is clipped. Cut to an announcer saying that “The Richard Pryor Show” is proud to present “& the Pips.” He’s told that Gladys can take care of herself. “I didn’t,” Hemphill’s character reminds, “say nothing about no Gladys.” Pryor wonders how Gladys might feel about that. Her character suggests to a tuxedoed Pryor that he should host her favorite group - “the Pips” - on his show. There’s a skit featuring comedian Shirley Hemphill. The singularity of her leadership did not go uncommented upon by the all-male writers’ room of Richard Pryor’s 1977 “The Richard Pryor Special?” (NBC).
It contributes to the kind of wildly earnest vocal conversation that makes 1970’s “ If I Were Your Woman” emerge from swarms of Motown slow jams as a royal offering. Gladys Knight and her Pips’ chemistry is powerful in part because, within the harmonies, there is tension. It’s like an all-boys treehouse is infiltrated and a brilliant girl emerges as its charismatic leader. The energy around Gladys Knight & the Pips is radical. Of the many Black R&B pop groups to come out of the Motown era - the Supremes, the Shirelles, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Stylistics, Martha and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, the Isley Brothers, the Drifters, the Jackson 5 and the O’Jays among them - Gladys Knight, along with Ruby Nash of Ruby and the Romantics, are the only Black women lead singers with an all-male vocal backup. Knight did the same for the Pips - led by example. In the video he looks as if he might come out from under that bolero. The earnest emotional surge of Knight’s voice and body language give John permission to get grimy. But it’s Knight who rolls into its last third, infused with the holiness of giving back (the song raised near $2 million for AIDS research) and the convergence of talent by which she is surrounded. One of the most transcendent pop records of all time, 1985’s “ That’s What Friends Are For,” stars Dionne Warwick, and features Stevie Wonder (on harmonica as well as vocals) and Elton John. In my mind, she gets him to the station, but when the train pulls off, Knight is still on the platform. Even when I was a kid, Gladys Knight sounded to me like she was singing one thing and wanting another. Why? Because though Knight is forthright - I got to go / I got to go - about leaving, she also sounds like she’s convincing herself. One of the most forlorn and perfect songs ever recorded, “Midnight Train to Georgia” is my favorite song of all time. 1 pop single, is the stunning and succinct story of a woman torn. The 1973 song, a huge R&B hit and the group’s only No. Why are the Pips so certain of Knight’s decision to climb aboard Amtrak? They nearly step on her mournful I’ll be with him with their unified I know you will. Why does Gladys Knight have to go back to Georgia if she’s doing okay in Los Angeles? He’s the one, after all, who pawned all his hopes. Since my first paychecks from the ’hood pool where I swabbed concrete with chlorine. This essay is adapted from Danyel Smith’s new book, “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.”