In 1972, Gladys Knight and the Pips appeared on the television show “Soul!,” where they performed, among other hits, “If I Were Your Woman,” a ballad in which the singer tells a man who is already taken that he deserves better; he deserves her. Knight wore a low-cut, ankle-length purple dress, and her princess-style hairdo was fastened with a matching bow; the Pips (all men) looked sharp in cream-colored turtlenecks and dark suits. “You’re like a diamond,” Knight declared, pointing a finger to the sky then shimmying her hand to signal the glimmer—“but she treats you like glass! Yet you beg her to love you—ha!—but me you don’t ask.” She’s not upset, she’s dancing, at least as much as the small stage permits; she rows her torso forward, and sends up another vocal firework: “If I were your woman—woo!” By now it’s clear that Knight is not on the sidelines of anything, and that if she’s anyone’s woman, she belongs to—or, rather, is meant to shine with—the Pips.
Despite their extraordinary talent, Gladys Knight and the Pips have been more beloved by fans than respected by music historians. Histories of pop music tend to favor individuals over groups: Sam Cooke over the Soul Stirrers, Patti LaBelle over the pseudonymous trio in which she started out. But stories about soul also enforce a simple binary that Gladys Knight and the Pips resist, wherein supposedly assimilationist Motown entertainers such as the Supremes and nineteen-sixties Stevie Wonder are succeeded by unapologetically Black, conscious artists such as Nina Simone, James Brown, and nineteen-seventies Stevie Wonder. Two recent soul documentaries tell a more nuanced story: the 2018 film “Mr. Soul!,” about the “Soul!” host Ellis Haizlip, and this year’s “Summer of Soul,” a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. (The latter includes both Sly and the Family Stone’s performance of the interracial solidarity of “Everyday People” and Nina Simone’s recitation of a poem asking Black people if they were ready to kill.) Yet neither film knows quite what to do with Gladys Knight and the Pips—a group that, although it had begun in the nineteen-fifties, and recorded hit singles in the nineteen-sixties, didn’t take off until the early seventies. They broke through not by singing protest anthems (their biggest message song, “Friendship Train,” encouraged everyone to get along) but by advancing a wholesome yet gender-progressive image of pro-Black excellence.
By 1973, when Gladys Knight and the Pips released their biggest hit, “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and Phyl Garland, a critic at Ebony, deemed them “the best soul group of the day performing at its peak,” they were already something of a throwback. Not only had they stayed together while many other singing groups had broken up, they were show people in the mold of their legendary trainer, the choreographer Cholly Atkins—amid the sober, cerebral aesthetic of artists like Roberta Flack and Gil Scott-Heron, they still seemed genuinely happy to be onstage. Certainly, they had worked hard enough. The group had formed at a birthday party in their home town of Atlanta in 1952, when Knight and her older brother Merald, known as Bubba, then eight and ten, respectively, joined forces with their sister Brenda and cousins Eleanor and William Guest. (William stayed, and Brenda and Eleanor were replaced by another cousin, Edward Patten.) After years of touring, the group signed with Motown in 1966 and released “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” But Motown prioritized other stars (like the Supremes and Marvin Gaye, who made “Grapevine” an even bigger hit), so they left for Buddah Records in the early seventies, which became the site of their greatest creative control and commercial success.
The scholar Mark Anthony Neal has written that Knight was “the female voice of the Black working class in the 1970s”—more grounded than either the divine Aretha Franklin or the glamorous Diana Ross—and the group’s sensibilities were also working-class. Their pro-Blackness, like their respectability, was more functional than stylish: Merald Knight explained the group’s longevity by telling a Washington Post reporter in 1972 that they hoped to give “young black kids and some of the older ones, too, an opportunity to see a Black organization stay together throughout its life span.” The group displayed more flair in their gender politics: three dancing men with high voices and close-cut naturals backing a straight-haired powerhouse whose voice was rough like Tina Turner’s, but whose self-presentation was tame. (Whereas Ike played the role of Tina’s husband-pimp in an effort to exploit her sexuality, the Pips were like amiable bouncers who mitigated Knight’s allure.) Like many soul singers, Knight had been raised in the Baptist church, and it left its mark on her raspy, textured voice; but she didn’t sing elaborate gospel melismas or ad libs—she was more of a front woman than a soloist, geared toward the efficient expression of heart.
Still, Knight was creatively and professionally ambitious. In the interview she gave on “Soul!” before singing “If I Were Your Woman,” she tells Gerry Bledsoe and Roslyn Woods that she enjoys “clean fun” like picnics and doesn’t go out much because she has two kids. But she also emphasizes that she and the Pips write most of their own arrangements and backing parts; expresses dismay that the Pips started doing their “fast-stepping thing” before other groups, but didn’t get credit; and notes that, in the nineteen-fifties, the four of them wrote free-form songs that broke with the verse-chorus-verse pop format—the kind of songs “in Sly’s bag” that people weren’t ready for yet.
Gladys Knight and the Pips became known, instead, for songs that are now so ingrained in our popular consciousness that we take their innovations for granted. “Midnight Train to Georgia,” for instance, was based on a song by Jim Weatherly, who originally described a woman taking a midnight plane to Houston; the singer Cissy Houston changed the mode of transport and the destination. (“My people were originally from Georgia, and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else,” Houston said.) Knight and the Pips admired Houston’s understated version, but they wanted a thicker instrumentation and a punchy horn arrangement in the style of Al Green—“Something moody with a little ride to it,” Knight later said. She also changed some of the lyrics, singing “He’s leaving a life he’s come to know” instead of “we’ve come to know.”
That revision, remarkably, moves the speaker even further into the margins of the song. She is telling the story of a man whose dreams of stardom didn’t pan out, and whom she plans to accompany back home to the South. But she tells it so emphatically that the emotional center shifts. No other vocal group could have dramatized the play between foreground and background as skillfully as Gladys Knight and the Pips. Merald Knight, Patten, and Guest provide key bits of information (the man might have been “a superstar, but he didn’t get far”), and propel Knight’s passage through both story and song: “Gonna board,” they sing, conductors for and witnesses to her act of witnessing. “I’ll be with him,” Knight sings. “I know you will,” they sing back.
Knight, who is now seventy-seven, went solo in the nineteen-eighties. She personalized the theme that began as a universal appeal on “Friendship Train” in the 1985 group mega-single “That’s What Friends Are For.” She still performs legacy concerts and appeared alongside Patti LaBelle in a “Verzuz” sing-off last year. She has at times displayed the more conservative impulses associated with an ethic of Black excellence. In 2019, when other Black artists expressed support for Colin Kaepernick by declining to perform at the Super Bowl, Knight defended her decision to sing the national anthem by saying that the song should be kept separate from acts of protest.
But her approach to musical activism has always been subtle, if not inscrutable. We see this in “Summer of Soul.” Knight is interviewed for the film, providing comments so on-message they are featured in the trailer. “Motown was very interested in us keeping our integrity—having class, being polite,” she says. “But I knew something very, very important was happening in Harlem that day. It wasn’t just about the music. We wanted progress. We are Black people and we should be proud, and we want our people lifting us up! . . . So when we went out, we went, ‘Let’s go, let’s do it!’ ” While relating the story, Knight makes what looks like a Black Power fist. But there is a gap between the story she tells and what appears onscreen. We see the group’s air-tight performance of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and, as they walk offstage, the Pips raise their fists, while Gladys waves. These moments of disconnect—between the members of a group, and between what is remembered and what is portrayed—are perfectly suited to soul. It was a musical culture that was, at base, about trying to be yourself while striving to find and keep your people. Knight’s hand gestures were those of a singer, not a fighter or activist; she formed fists onstage for dramatic effect. But her performance of vocal prowess and joyful belonging was her own version of a Black Power salute.
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