Gladys Knight & the Pips

[musicradio77]

Here's another Motown 45th Anniversary Artists Avatar of the week. This week will feature the group has been on Motown for a while since they went into different labels. The group is Gladys Knight & the Pips. It all started in the early 60's where a young Glady Knight who teamed up and formed with her group, the Pips with her brother Merald and a few cousins. The group made their first hit in 1961 with a doo-wop influenical tune "Every Beat of My Heart" which it was a success on both labels like Vee-Jay and Fury. Their next released "Letter Full of Tears" and "Giving Up" didn't made it to the Top 10 until they went to Motown in 1966. Their first pair of singles for Motown was the original "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" which was a Top 10 a never made it to #1 (meanwhile, Marvin Gaye's version was #1 in 1969.) The group had many hits during the Motown period with "Friendship Train", "If I Were Your Woman" and their biggest hit "Neitner One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)". They left Motown in 1973 and went Buddah Records with a string of hits like "Midnight Train to Georgia", "You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me", "I Got to Use My Imagination", "On and On" and a few more. In the mid-70's, Glady Knight did a live version of a Barbra Streisand song "The Way We Were" with her intro "Try to Remember" (from "The Fantasticks"). They left Buddah in the late 70's and went to Columbia and had some strong hits through the 1980's. In the early 80's the group teamed up with Marvin Gaye with a live version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" from the TV special. On the TV special "Motown 45", Gladys Knight reunited with the Pips once again performed the original version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine". And they did.