Tina Knowles
speaker
321 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Tina Knowles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Well, just because I think in your family, have you ever wondered where you got something from, where you got the strength to get through something or where you got the that feeling of fear. I mean, there are many things that I connected the dots on just looking at my ancestors and my grandparents. Both of my great grandmothers were enslaved, but they kept their kids with them.
So you know that that was a priority, and you know what that had to take back then, but somehow they managed to do that. And I just feel like that's such a strong thing. So I know when times have been so, so rough for me, and I've been through a lot in my life, that that's what got me through.
It's those ancestors, that strength, that we were just kick-ass women that hung in there and dealt with the obstacles. Yeah.
I think that you should research it. And there are, I mean, think about it. For me, I'm 71 years old, so. Let's just stop there. Y'all. This is what 71 looks like when you act right. I'm sorry. But I was just saying that, you know, back in my time, we didn't have Ancestry.com and all these resources that we have now. And I remember starting that process, like, many years ago, maybe...
14 years ago, whenever. You did ancestry? I did ancestry, and I did, but I started first just looking back to say, you know, my mom has told me these stories about my mother's family. She always told me stories about them, and I knew their names. I really didn't know my daddy's people. And so I started being interested in where the name, it's actually Beyoncé, you know, where he came from.
And why is my name spelled B-E-Y-I-N-C-E? Well, someone did something on Instagram that's a relative of mine, I don't know him, but there were like 17 spellings of that. And, you know, that happened to a lot of people in here.
You might think that was your original spelling, but when you go back and look, it's just changed, especially with people of color, because black people, because we took on these slated names, and we were called everything, or in my case, we weren't important enough for you to spell it right on my birth certificate. So all of us have different spellings.
But it is important for you to know where you came from and to pass that on to your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, because I never got to meet my grandmother. And my children never got to meet their grandmother. And so I started writing this book like when I got a divorce in like 19, I mean 19, look at me, I'm aging myself. And... It felt like it was that long.
Yeah, I was... And you're right. I was 59. Let me say that because I don't know what year it was, but... I just felt... We'll get to that later. Yeah, I felt very... Disconnected. I felt old at 59. Lord have mercy. This time it was 69. Can you imagine? But I just felt like my mom started thinking about mortality. And I'm like, what if my grandchildren don't get to meet me?
Not my great-grandchildren. Yes. And how would they know? Because my mom's favorite thing was keep a word going. And that meant tell the stories and keep your messages, keep your stories going generations down. And in order to do that, I had to start writing it. So that's how I started just recording it. And I was able to go back to that. you know, when we started writing.
And I encourage everybody. You know, people ask me, what do you want people to leave with? And that is what I want you to leave with, that I never thought I'd publish a book. And you don't have to publish a book. Leave it for your great-grandchildren so that they can know your history and hear it from you.
Because you know your cousins would be like, oh, your mama, you know, she was over there doing this and that. Tell your own story.
Celestine, you said they called you everything but. Everything. And then I had a last name like Beyonce. That was a lot of names for a little kid in the 50s. You know, we didn't have these cool, creative names. I wanted my name to be Linda Smith or Judy. Just Linda.
So tell the story about how you finally did change your name. Well, my mama was in the hospital, and my brothers had to take me to register me for school. So I was like, please don't tell them my name is Celeste. Please. And they were like, we don't know what to do, because they're going to look at your birth certificate. And I said, just don't give it to them.
So we went in there, and we just said, our mama is in the hospital. We all look real sad. And we don't have the paperwork, but we promise we'll bring it back. But it's so important to my mama that we get my little sister in school. They didn't go along with it at first, but I was like begging, and my brother Larry, who was a softie, he helped me out.
And I literally, in fifth grade, changed my name to Tina. By the time we brought the paperwork, it was too late. I was Tina.
Well, I grew up in this area that was a working class neighborhood. And everybody was poor, so I don't think we knew. And we had this backyard that they would say, oh, they have a huge backyard. I went to that house with Beyonce, and she was like, mama, that is a huge backyard. But to us, it was huge, and we had a swing set, because my mama collected S&H green stamps.
Listen, my mama was serious in there. She would take all of us, and I had eight. My sister had eight. Eight children. And we would all go and we would look so pitiful and say, do y'all want y'all stamps? That's how we get our Christmas presents. Which was true, but people would just give us stamps and we would just collect them. And they got, we had ping pong sets, croquet sets.
Like my mom, that was the playground for everyone. She figured out a way to do everything.
It's the ferry, the free ferry. But my mama would say, y'all want to go on our boat today? And we'd be like, yeah. And then I was sharing in the book that when I became a teenager, that was part of the Tina game. Because I would take my boyfriends out there and sing to them and say, you want to go on my yacht? And they'd get there, and it was the free ferry.
Showing 81–100 of 321 · page 5 of 17
← Previous
Next →