Home » Latest » Celebrity » 20 Things You Should Know About Beyoncé

20 Things You Should Know About Beyoncé

11

43 0 Celebrity

9.1

SaveSavedRemoved 3

Twenty facts about the woman who turned Houston choir practice into a global empire.

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter didn’t just have a career by 2017 — she had a résumé that read like a record book. Twenty Grammys, two Super Bowl halftime shows, a $256 million tour, and a surprise album that broke the internet’s release schedule entirely. TheThings Celebrity’s rundown, “20 Things You Should Know About Beyoncé,” walks through how a Houston kid who sang in church choir became the artist everyone in the industry measures themselves against.

• Born Beyoncé Giselle Knowles on September 4, 1981, in Houston, Texas — a name chosen as a tribute to her mother Tina’s maiden name, Beyincé.
• She competed on Star Search in the group Girl’s Tyme alongside Kelly Rowland and LaTavia Roberson before that lineup evolved into Destiny’s Child in 1995, a name drawn from a passage in the Book of Isaiah.
• By 2016 she had 20 Grammy Awards, two Super Bowl halftime performances (2013 and 2016), and a Formation World Tour that grossed $256 million across 49 sold-out dates.

From Houston Choir to Star Search

Beyoncé’s parents ran a household built around hustle. Mathew Knowles worked as a Xerox sales manager before he left that job to manage his daughter’s career full-time, and Tina Knowles ran her own salon as a working hairstylist. It was Beyoncé’s childhood dance instructor, not a talent scout, who first flagged that the kid could actually sing.

That voice got tested early and publicly. She competed on the televised talent competition Star Search as part of the all-girl group Girl’s Tyme, alongside Kelly Rowland and LaTavia Roberson. The act didn’t win, but it didn’t need to — the lineup kept evolving, and by 1995 it had become the four-piece group Destiny’s Child, a name pulled from a passage in Isaiah. The group went on to become one of the top-selling female groups in music history.

The Solo Run and the Grammy Count

Beyoncé’s solo catalog is basically a decade-by-decade victory lap: Dangerously in Love in 2003, B’Day in 2006, I Am… Sasha Fierce in 2008, 4 in 2011, the self-titled surprise visual album in 2013, and Lemonade in 2016. Each one moved the goalposts for what a pop release could look and sound like, and the Beyoncé visual album in particular reset expectations for how records get dropped in the streaming era — no lead single, no rollout, just a midnight release with a full set of videos attached.

By 2016 that run had produced 20 Grammy Awards, making her one of the most decorated artists in the award’s history. She’d also headlined two Super Bowl halftime shows, in 2013 and again in 2016, and closed out the Formation World Tour that same year with a gross of $256 million over 49 sold-out dates. Long famous for keeping reporters at arm’s length on anything personal, she’s the rare superstar who built that stature almost entirely on the work itself rather than the press tour — the kind of instinct covered in Top 10 Celebrity Comebacks: Stars Silencing Disrespectful Interviewers.

Formation World Tour: 49 sold-out dates, $256 million grossed.

The Number Four and a Family of Coincidences

Beyoncé’s family has a running joke about the number four that’s really more of a pattern than a joke. She was born on September 4, her mother Tina was born on January 4, and her husband, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, was born on December 4. The coincidence runs deep enough that the couple both got matching “IV” tattoos on their ring fingers.

She married Jay-Z in 2008, and the pair welcomed their daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, on January 7, 2012. Away from the stage, Beyoncé has spent years cultivating a public image that reveals almost nothing by accident — a discipline that separates her from plenty of peers profiled in pieces like Musicians That Are Nothing Like They Seem, where the gap between the persona and the person tends to be the whole story.

Every detail that leaks out, from the tattoo to the tour gross to the Grammy count, gets treated like a headline because so little else does. That’s the trade Beyoncé made a long time ago — control the output, ration the access — and by early 2017, with Lemonade still dominating award-season conversation, it was working exactly the way she wanted it to.