Knight's voice got baby boomers through their adolescent joys and heartaches. They felt for her when she plaintively acknowledged, ``There can be no way this can have a happy ending,'' on her 1973 classic, ``Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).'' And when she passionately declared ``I got to go, I got to go, I got to go'' on the 1974 chart-buster ``Midnight Train to Georgia,'' who didn't urge Gladys to go, girl! Go be with your man for all of us!
The lilt, it turns out, doesn't belong to Knight at all, but to her daughter, Kenya Jackson, 33. A more delicate version of her mother, Jackson is accompanying Knight on a 13-city tour to promote the singer's new memoir, Between Each Line of Pain and Glory: My Life Story (Hyperion). Mother and daughter are also promoting Kenya's Gourmet Bakery, the restaurant they recently opened near their Las Vegas homes.
Graciously, Knight emerges wearing a full smile, a musky fragrance, and the sharpest pair of black leather shoes this side of King of Prussia.
``How are you?'' she asks in that unmistakably husky voice, plopping down on the couch like a friend with a lot of catching up to do.
Two questions immediately come to mind. First, how on earth does she manage to look so vibrant at 53? And second, just how big is that ice- cube-shaped diamond she's flashing on her well-manicured hand?
Les Brown gave her the ring when they got engaged, but now that Knight is divorcing the nationally known motivational speaker after two years of marriage, she's switched it from her left hand to her right.
The last chapter of her book was supposed to be, as she writes, a happy ending. Instead, as she gathered her final thoughts, process servers knocked on her door and handed her divorce papers filed by Brown.
``I don't think I'd even read all the way through those papers before he was issuing a press release announcing our divorce to the media,'' she writes.
What happened?
