A year later she was touring the south of the United States with her parents as part of the Morris Brown Choir; aged seven she won first prize on the US show, the Original Amateur Hour. “That was so cool,” Gladys enthuses. “I sang Nat King Cole’s Too Young. My whole family, my mom, my dad, my two brothers and my two sisters, all got to travel up to Brooklyn for the filming. It was a huge adventure. We got to stay in my cousin’s mansion, with a swimming pool, a Rolls Royce in the garage, two bathrooms and a kitchen the size of our house. It was great, and I won $2000 on top of that.”
The experience left its mark. “A year later we were at my brother Bubba’s tenth birthday party. Me, Bubba, my sister Brenda and my cousins William and Elenor Guest decided to sing. That was the first time the Pips played together. Of course we weren’t called the Pips back then. We were known as the Knight Kids. Then we became The Group, and we were finally dubbed the Pips after our cousin and manager James Woods, whose nickname was Pip.”
It was Knight’s aunt who recognised the group’s potential and hooked them up with her local promoter friend, Maurice King. He had the fledgling stars filling the bars of Atlanta, Georgia at night. Doubling as a gospel group the Fountainaires in the day, they were also filling out the aisles at the Mount Mariah’s Baptist Church after school.
