Gladys Knight

After Georgia revenue agents raided all three of the restaurants that carried her name on June 21, 2016, Gladys Knight went to court against her own son to get it taken down. The restaurants were his. Gladys Knight & Ron Winans' Chicken & Waffles opened in 1997 at 618 Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown Atlanta, with the mayor, Bill Campbell, in attendance, and Knight said at the time: "I've always wanted to get into the restaurant business, and now I'm able to do it vicariously through my kids." Her son Shanga Hankerson ran it and the two that followed, on Cascade Road in Atlanta and in Lithonia, and one location got a segment on the Travel Channel's Man v. Food. The Georgia Department of Revenue said in June 2016 that the business owed about $650,000 in unpaid sales and withholding taxes, more than $1 million once penalties and interest were added, and served seven arrest warrants on Hankerson for theft by taking and theft by conversion. He was released on a $20,000 bond. The department's investigations chief, Jeff Mitchell, told WSB-TV the case involved only Hankerson, and Knight's spokeswoman said that "Ms. Knight was not involved in any way with the operation of the restaurants" and had lent her name the way a celebrity lends it to an endorsement. The restaurants reopened on June 24, 2016. The Lithonia one closed in August, the Cascade one in October, and the Peachtree Street location shut voluntarily the same month after $9,000 went missing from its safe. The last of them was raided again on February 23, 2017 and closed for good, and Hankerson had until April 26, 2017 to take his mother's name off it, which is how the Atlanta Journal-Constitution came to describe the whole affair as a "wild saga" in June 2017. Strip away the celebrity and it is an ordinary story about licensing: a name lent to a family member, no operating control, and no way to get the name back when the operator went wrong except a lawsuit. You will not find many clearer illustrations of why lawyers put reversion clauses in licensing agreements.

Treat the singing career as an enterprise and the table looks like any other small firm that changed suppliers every decade or so and kept the management in the family.

The management line matters more than the label line. Newman Management Inc., run by her son Jimmy Newman III, handled her career until his death from heart failure on July 10, 1999, and her daughter Kenya Jackson took it over from there. Her memoir, Between Each Line of Pain and Glory, came out from Hyperion in 1998, and a second book, At Home With Gladys Knight, from McGraw-Hill in 2001. The Wikipedia entry records that Diana Ross had the group thrown off a Supremes tour in the Motown years because audiences liked Knight too much; Berry Gordy later told her she was giving his act a hard time. The move to Buddah in 1973 was the best commercial decision the family made, and the numbers say so: Midnight Train to Georgia went to number one in the United States in 1973 and to the UK top five in the summer of 1976, three years late.

The restaurant and the baptism share a year. Knight was raised Baptist, spent a stretch as a Catholic, and in 1997 joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after her daughter and son had already done so. The thing she built inside the Church is, again, an organisation with a discography:

• Saints Unified Voices, founded in 2002 in Las Vegas, a volunteer choir of more than 100 members with Knight as founder and music director.
• One Voice, released January 4, 2005, entered Billboard's gospel chart as the number one Hot Shot Debut and stayed in the top 40 for 48 weeks, peaking at number 9.
• The album won the Grammy for Best Gospel Choir or Chorus Album on February 8, 2006, which is how a Las Vegas volunteer choir came to hold the same award as its director.
• A Christmas Celebration followed in October 2006, and the choir has sung at firesides and travelled as far as England and Hawaii.
• In June 2018 she led the Be One Choir at the Church's celebration in Salt Lake City marking 40 years since the 1978 revelation on the priesthood.

Her Wikipedia entry has her teasing the Church's then president, Gordon B. Hinckley, that its music needed some "pep", and dates the choir to his agreement. Whether that conversation happened the way the story is told, nobody outside the room can say. The Deseret News version, from June 2003, has her choir filling two-thirds of the Tabernacle Choir's seats at a 25th-anniversary event for the 1978 revelation.

A volunteer choir in Las Vegas, and by February 2006 it had a Grammy.

Seven Grammys from 22 nominations, four of them solo and three with the Pips. Two number one Billboard Hot 100 singles, eleven number one R&B singles, six number one R&B albums, and the theme to the 1989 Bond film Licence to Kill. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Pips in 1996, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001, the National Medal of Arts in 2021, Kennedy Center Honors in 2022 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. She sang the national anthem at Super Bowl LIII in February 2019 and defended the booking against critics of the NFL's treatment of Colin Kaepernick, saying she understood his reasons but objected to kneeling during the anthem (Wikipedia, Gladys Knight). That same month viewers learned she had been the Bee on the first season of The Masked Singer, finishing third behind Donny Osmond. In 2017 she helped raise $400,000 for the Children's Learning Centers of Fairfield County in Stamford, Connecticut.

The most recent entry is dated August 27, 2026. After videos from the summer tour with Smokey Robinson circulated online, her manager, William McDowell, released a statement, and Knight posted on Instagram that she would be "easing into fewer performances" and thanked fans for "this last three quarters of a century". The Pips signed their first contract 69 years earlier.