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• Ms. Knight on Verve Records
• About "Before Me"
• Saints Unified Voices
• About Ms. Knight

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Tavis: Oh, I'm tickled already. I'm just pleased to welcome Gladys Knight to this program. Name just sounds sweet, doesn't it? Gladys Knight, legendary singer and performer, still going strong after more than fifty years in the show business. Of course, she started before she was born (laughter).

Gladys Knight: (Laughter) In the womb.

Tavis: Yeah, in the womb. In truth, she was just eight years old when she teamed up with a group called - you might have heard of them - The Pips. Together, they would become one of music's biggest acts and, since then, she has enjoyed a very successful solo career. Her latest CD - and it's about time - a collection of standards. That's right. Gladys is doing the standards. It's called "Before Me." From the disc, here she is performing the Billie Holiday classic, "I'll Be Seeing You."

[A film clip is shown]

Tavis: For those real Gladys Knight fans, you can never see her anywhere without saying, "Gladys, Gladys, Gladys."

Knight: What (laughter)?

Tavis: (Laughter) It's nice to see you.

Knight: It's so great to be here with you.

Tavis: I am honored to have you on this set.

Knight: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Who knew? Gladys does the standards.

Knight: Yeah. Well, see, people don't know a whole, whole, whole lot about me and I have been doing this forever. But I started out singing that music. I've been singing since I was four. As I grew up and we became a part of this industry, my mom and my dad, you know, always told us about the performance side and those people who could bring you where you should be, and they were the people that came before us, okay?

As I came through this industry, I helped support my family by singing, you know. I was in a little jazz band with Lloyd Terry, see? Before he would allow me to perform or sing with him, I was thirteen, I think, then, so he had got my mom's permission for me to do that, and he made me study. I mean, I've kept that with me all my life, the study part of it.

Tavis: Made you study what?

Knight: He made me study these greats. He gave me this big stack of albums, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughan, all the people, and I had to go home and listen to these people and he would ask me questions. He was the band director at my high school. He'd say, "Okay, what'd you hear last night?"

Tavis: So you had pop quizzes every day.

Knight: I did. So I had to know about this music, so by the time I started singing with them, as the Lord would have it, as I came out on the road with The Pips, I started to meet all of these great people that I had studied, you know.

Tavis: So some of the folk that you cover you've had a chance to meet if not work with.

Knight: I met everyone one of them except Billie Holiday.

Tavis: Except Billie Holiday.

Knight: She's the only one. But I felt like I knew her because I worked with all of her friends, our mentors. Charlie Atkins. That was his good buddy, you know, who was our choreographer. We called him Pop. Maurice King, who was the number one musical director in the country for so long from The Flame Show Bar. He was our vocal coach and musical director for so many years. We just had all those people around us. My mom saw to it.

Tavis: This is a strange question to ask Gladys Knight, of all people.

Knight: That's okay.

Tavis: Let me ask you anyway, though.

Knight: Okay.

Tavis: Were you at all - with all of your massive talent, were you at all intimidated to attempt to put on record Ella's stuff, Billie's stuff? That's a tall order, any one of them.

Knight: It is.

Tavis: You just got bold and put something of all of them. That's a lot of nerve, Gladys Knight.

Knight: I did, but you know what? My spirit was so grateful. I wasn't ever thinking of competing with them. Never would, never could, okay? But, I mean, that's the sincerest form of flattery, you know, to do someone, to give them back what they gave you and that's all I wanted to say was thank you and here's your music and I am honored to do it because you did it. So it was just amazing.

Tavis: I'm just laughing inside because I've heard some people try to touch your stuff and I'm like leave that alone. You ain't Gladys (laughter).

Knight: Oh, you're such a sweet baby.

Tavis: Just leave that alone. You ain't got no business trying to do nothing with that (laughter).

Knight: Thank you so much.

Tavis: To your point you made earlier, Gladys, of all the stuff that you used to listen to, how did you get down to twelve tracks?

Knight: That was hard.

Tavis: I know it had to be.

Knight: That was very difficult. I just went with the first things that came to my mind. The things that you hear on this particular CD were things that I found myself humming the most. You know, "I'll Be Seeing You" and "Stormy Weather." You know, Lena Horne. I can see her. When I sing, I see these people. Ella Fitzgerald was so into my heart and into my spirit, you know.

She would see me. I could look up and see her in my audience and she was so unassuming like I wanted to grow up to be. She didn't have a problem coming to your dressing room. She didn't sit in her dressing room and say, "Well, there's Miss Fitzgerald." She didn't play that. She would say, "Hey, baby." Those are the kind of people that I grew up with and, yeah, there were some that were into themselves, but it was so amazing. Their gifts were so extraordinary.

Tavis: One can't be around you for more than two minutes and not know that your roots are in the south. We all know that.

Knight: Am I talking country (laughter)?

Tavis: No, no, no (laughter). Actually, you were, but that's okay. We all know Gladys Knight. We all know your roots down south, but if one did not know you and spent any time with you and knew anything about the American experience, they would say, "She must be from down south somewhere."

I raise that only because you have never shied away from that. You've never tried to leave that. You've always claimed that. How important a part of your development and your success was it to have been born and raised and come up out of that deep southern tradition?

Knight: I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else. They had - I say they, meaning people from the south, most of them. Let's put the segregation thing on the other side.

Tavis: But I'm coming back to that in a second.

Knight: Okay.

Tavis: We'll leave it there for the moment.

Knight: Okay. Let's put that on the other side and let's get to what family was like for an African American. They only see that part where we struggled, but they don't go inside the family and see that we had a mom and we had a dad and they were hardworking, you know, and they didn't have a lot, but they made us appreciate that that we did have.

We cooked. There was not a woman in my family who didn't know how to cook and it wasn't something that we were proud to stand up and say. You know, "We know how to cook." You know, like you hear so much today. You know, "I ain't cooking nothing."

Tavis: I asked a girl the other day, "What you making tonight?" She said, "Reservations."

Knight: (Laughter) You ought to quit. But you know what I'm saying? I learned that at the knee of my grandmothers and my aunts and my mother and that kind of thing. So the things that they gave us was the basic way of living, how to survive, how to take care of a family, because a lot of the women didn't work in the beginning like work now, choosing to follow professions and what have you. It was home first.

I can remember my mom and dad had one of their greatest arguments about him working himself to death and my mom trying to say, "Merald, I'm healthy. Let me work. Let me help." "You ain't working. You stay at home with the children." There were four of us and his mom and sister lived with us. It was the family thing, and that's what I loved about the south. It kept our feet on the ground.

You know, they kept us eating and healthy and I do say healthy because, when you think of soul food these days, you don't think healthy because they've taken all the grease out and that kind of thing. But for that time, it was a different grease.

Tavis: I like that (laughter). I like that. I ain't never heard that formulation before. It was a different grease.

Knight: It was a different grease.

Tavis: I'm laughing about that, but you know what's real about that? I'm laughing, but what's real about that is, to your point, we have changed so much about everything as a part of Black culture.

Knight: And we talk about how we eat so unhealthy and this, that and the other, but my grandmother lived to be ninety-five.

Knight: Thank you very much. My mom said, "I'm living 'til eighty." She lived to eighty.

Tavis: See that? So something ain't right.

Knight: You know, I've seen my grandmother churn the butter. That's a different butter than what you find in the stores. So it's a different world. Yes, it is.

Tavis: That segregation thing that you put over there?

Knight: Bring it back?

Tavis: Bring it back over here. Come on, I saw you put it over there. Thank you very much.

Knight: There you go.

Tavis: I want some of this now.

Knight: Okay.

Tavis: You can't, though, with all due respect, talk about the joy of family that you just talked about - and I'm glad you brought that out - you can't talk about that, though, in your experience and leave out that stuff that you just brought back.

Knight: You cannot.

Tavis: You experienced some outright racism in your career.

Knight: We certainly did.

Tavis: We think of you now and the star that you are. That ain't how it always was, though. You got a lot of racism then.

Knight: That's very true.

Tavis: Tell me about those on the road days when you were maltreated just because you looked the way you do from Georgia.

Knight: My first encounter because we were not brought up in our home environment to know racism, my mom and dad taught us that you deal with people one on one. They do you wrong, no matter what color they are is wrong. They do you right, if they're right by you, no matter what color they are, it's in their spirit to be that way, so that's the way I was brought up. As you know, we lived in segregated communities, but we didn't feel it. We didn't know we were poor, if you want to call it poor. I thought we was pretty rich myself because we had a home. We polished them floors every weekend.

So my first encounter with that, yes, we had the things downtown. We went downtown, the black and white water fountains and that kind of thing, and I would go to either one. My mom would stand there and watch. I'd say, "Mom, what color is white water?" She'd say, "There's no such thing, baby." So she allowed us to be bold probably knowing at that time that somebody could have shot her right on the spot.

We didn't know it because they didn't present that to us. That doesn't mean that we were unaware per se of the fact that there was segregation. We knew there wasn't no white people in our schools, and there wasn't no Black people in theirs.

My first encounter with racism, The Pips had to really calm me down because I was kind of really naïve. We were on the road and we drove everywhere then. We had stopped. We were doing this tour. We never came out west in the early days. It was all north and south. We were on our way to Alabama and we stopped at this gas station to get some gas and I had to go to the bathroom.

So we filled up the tank and I said, "Oh, I got to find the bathroom." They looked at me funny and I just marched right in and said, "Could you tell me where your bathroom is, sir?" He looked at me and he said, "We don't allow niggers to use our bathroom." I said, "What did you say?" I was getting ready to get indignant. You have to understand, I'm only nine or ten. I said, "What did you say?" And The Pips came and got me by both of my arms because I didn't even realize the extent of it.

These are African American men traveling in the south. They lynched people. I didn't know about all the severity of all of that at the time. I was just mumbling. I said, "What are you talking about? We just filled up," and they carried me out at the same time. I said, "We just filled up our tank at your gas station and you're telling me I can't use the bathroom?" and they're carrying me out to the car. I knew that much about it. From that day was when The Pips started to teach me because they were my parents.

Tavis: On the road.

Knight: On the road. After our first encounter, I had a chaperone and my mom and dad got told by The Pips, "We don't like her and we will take care of her. We'll take everything on the road that you taught us." From that day on, I didn't have a chaperone. They were my chaperones. They were too strict, though. They were too strict (laughter). I thought there was something wrong with me because they treated me like a guy and I grew up that way.

Tavis: I'm about to ask you, so let's just get into that. You were the only sister hanging out with all these brothers. It's a miracle that you are as well-adjusted as you are after all these years of hanging out with guys.

Knight: I'm telling you. I mean, I didn't get to date per se and, come to find out later, they were threatening all the guys that would come near me. That was the only way they knew how to take care of me. If I was on the bus - and we did many a bus tour. Sixty-five one-nighters - nobody could sit with me. I had a seat all by myself. I'd be trying to talk to people, you know, and stuff.

Tavis: Wasn't working.

Knight: No. And the first time I smelled some marijuana was on the bus. I jumped up and I said, "Who burning rags on this bus?" And Bubba was sitting behind me. I was sitting by myself. He grabbed me by the back of my collar and threw me down in the seat. He said, "Sit down and shut up. Open the window and put your head out the window."

Tavis: (Laughter) Bubba, my man.

Knight: Bubba, you know. I mean, they were men. They didn't know either, but they were trying to be big boys out on the road. You know, we can hang with this. We don't do that because our mom said it would kill us. We don't do that kind of stuff, but we got to hang with these guys. We can't be all -

Tavis: - when did you know that you were a star? At what point, what hit, when did you know like, wow, we have arrived. People know who we are?

Knight: I mean this in the most sincere way. I never did. When I was on television, my first recital was when I was four. She always kept us being kids, you know what I mean? My picture was everywhere and then when I went on Ted Mack when I was seven and I won the national prize, I mean, it was unheard of for African Americans to be on television. This was in the 1950s we're talking about.

Tavis: Gladys won the original American Idol.

Knight: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Tavis: You like that?

Knight: Yes, I like that.

Tavis: Long before it. Ted Mack was like the original American Idol.

Knight: It really was.

Tavis: And you went on as a child, seven years old, and won the national contest.

Knight: Won the national contest.

Tavis: So what do you think of American Idol and programs like that these days?

Knight: You know, I think it's a good thing, but my heart hurts sometimes. My husband tells me all the time, "You know what? You're a relic because show business is different. The world is different and all those things." I say, "But sometimes you don't throw the baby out with the bath." These kids are hungry and it comes down to a zip at somebody. You know, when they're just looking to find out what am I doing right or what am I doing wrong? That's not the spirit that, as human beings, we're supposed to have. But it's television and a show, and I just think it's unnecessary.

Tavis: Simon - we ain't calling no names, though (laughter). Anyway, when people ask you - which I suspect you must get asked all the time, running through airports and everywhere else - when these same kinds of young folk ask you advice - now this is a loaded question - ask you advice about the music business, synthesize it for me. What do you find yourself saying to young people after all these years of your being in it and being successful at it about the music business? What advice do you give them if they're going to get in this thing?

Knight: These days, it's a rat race. You got to know that up front, but there's some things that you need to do. If you're going to take this time out of your life to prepare yourself - and it does take time to do this - and you're looking for this to feed you and clothe you and house you, you need to really get dedicated to that and take the time that's necessary to plan this thing so it will give you a little bit of longevity. I know that's a foreign word to you all.

Tavis: Longevity, yeah. Everything is right now, right now, right now.

Knight: Right now, and you ain't going to be here but a minute. But there are things that you can do in order - I mean, when we came up, it was foreign for us to play Vegas. We were out of our comfort zone. Most of the groups that we came up with, the ladies are screaming and falling all out on the floor. Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke and all these guys, all they have to do is step on the stage and the women go crazy. That was before Tom Jones, thank you very much (laughter).

So it was a different environment to go somewhere where they probably didn't know what record you had. They wanted to be entertained. So here's a place, our mentors used to tell us, that you can work with or without a record and you do not want to be only as big as your last record if you want to eat, so you'd better learn how to perform. Now you notice that kids don't tour anymore and, when they do, it's so big that they don't make no money. You know, all those things blowing up and stuff. They cost dollars.

Tavis: (Laughter) Pyrotechnics.

Knight: Pyrotechnics. By the time you get through "pyroing," you ain't got no "technics," you know what I mean (laughter)?

Tavis: That old school right there. Put some money in your pocket (laughter). Do you ever get tired of singing the songs that you know we want to hear?

Knight: Yeah, okay. I have a hundred-voice choir, Saints Unified Voices, and they are just average working people in our church, The Church of Jesus Christ, that volunteer. They spend their time, they're just family people, they go to work. Now that we've started to share our testimonies with the world, people are calling us. We just finished New York and Washington and those kinds of things. It's something new to them, you know. We do two Firesides per day, Saturday and Sunday. That's four. We've been doing this for about two years now.

Sometimes they'll get a little lackluster, you know, and I say what's up with you all? Do you know I've been singing "Midnight Train" since 1973 and, every time I step on that stage, I got to make it like I'm doing it for the first time?

Tavis: (Laughter) That's right.

Knight: But you know what? I am because, if you got one person different in the audience, it changes the chemistry of the audience. It's not the same audience. Even if you had ninety percent of the same people that were for the last - you know where we learned that? At the Apollo. At the Royal. At the theatres in the round, you know, where people could just stay over and stay over and stay over all day if they wanted to. And we had to make it new every time we went out there. So find you a new face to look at. Oh, there's somebody to perform to. They haven't seen this before. I'll do this joke to them because the others know what it's going to be.

Tavis: Your fans love you so much that we like stalk you everywhere you go (laughter). I'm sure you see a lot of the same faces no matter where you perform.

Knight: (Laughter) I love it, I love it, I love it.

Tavis: And I love you too. See how fast that went? It's over. We're out of time and we ain't scratched the surface on this fifty-year career.

Knight: Well, before you go -

Tavis: Yes, ma'am.

Knight: And I have to say this.

Tavis: Say it.

Knight: Because it's imperative that we uplift each other when we have the opportunity. There's enough things going on outside of us that we have to fight that it's not a good thing when we don't uplift each other. I am so proud of you.

Tavis: Oh, thank you.

Knight: I have seen you on this show, that show and that show, with different palettes on every show, the political side, the music side, the fun side, all those things; and you have made me proud in every one of those arenas. You are prolific, yet you are fun. I tell the young people today, if you're going to do Ebonics, know how to drop it when you go to the White House. That's what I want us to learn and to share, and you are the embodiment of that. I am very grateful that you are here and that you are doing the things that you are doing. I'm glad to know you.

Tavis: What else am I going to say? Anyway, I love you. The new CD from Gladys Knight, "Before Me." Gladys is doing some standards. You got to get this and add it to your collection. She is a legend in her own time. How honored we are to have her on, and I love you, Gladys.

Knight: Thank you. I love you too, Tavis.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.