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.īy 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. (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. Soul!,” about the “Soul!” host Ellis Haizlip, and this year’s “ Summer of Soul,” a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Two recent soul documentaries tell a more nuanced story: the 2018 film “ Mr. 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.
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. “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.ĭespite their extraordinary talent, Gladys Knight and the Pips have been more beloved by fans than respected by music historians. 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. 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.
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