Gladys Knight

   
Artist: Gladys Knight

   Genre(s): 
Jazz
   R&B: Soul
   

---

Discography:


   
 Before Me

   Year: 2006   
Tracks: 12


   
 Good Woman

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 11


   
 Gladys Knight and The Pips - Greatest Hits

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 19

---

One of the groovy soul singers, Gladys Knight was a performer from her childhood age, forming the Pips with her brother Merald and a pair cousins. They made the Top Ten in 1961 with the heavily doo wop-influenced "Every Beat of My Heart," and recorded some fine, nowadays overlooked pop-soul sides for the Fury and Maxx labels in the early and mid-'60s, sometimes under the instruction of songwriter Van McCoy. A pair singles from this period of time, "Missive Full of Tears" and "Giving Up," made the Top 40, simply Knight didn't reach her commercial pace until she touched to Motown in 1966. Steeped in the religious doctrine tradition, like so many soul singers, Knight & the Pips developed into one of Motown's most reliable acts, although they never quite scaly the commercial-grade or artistic heights of fellow stars on the judge like the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations. With Norman Whitfield providing the production and a good deal of the songwriting, the Pips fit into the mainstream of Motown's machine well, grading big hits with some rabble-rousers (like "Friendly relationship Train" and the original version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"), mainstream midtempo soul ("It Should Have Been Me" and "The End of Our Road"), and smooth ballads like "If I Were Your Woman."


In 1973, Knight had her biggest Motown hit with "Neither One of Us," which made number two; shortly subsequently, she and the Pips left Motown for Buddah. The radical members were briefly superstars in 1973-1974, reeling off the smashes "Midnight Train to Georgia" (their only number one), "I've Got to Use My Imagination," and "Topper Thing That Ever Happened to Me." This ranked as some of their topper real, only Knight shortly affected toward an easy listening, adult modern-day direction, unitary that she's retained to this daylight. Now playing severally from the Pips (wHO make retired), her days as a high-charting headliner concluded later on the mid-'70s, although she stiff clean popular, and retained an active recording calling into the new millenary, cathartic At Last, an record album of urban R&B, on MCA in 2000; One Voice, a gospels jell, on Many Roads Records in 2005; and Before Me, an record album of jazz standards, on Verve in 2006.