The singer, who performed 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' during the Sunday, February 8 Grammys, discusses what the song means to her in a behind-the-scenes clip.
- Feb 10, 2015
AceShowbiz - Beyonce Knowles' performance was one of the highlights at the Sunday, February 8 Grammy Awards. The singer looked beautiful in a white dress as she wowed the crowd with her emotional rendition of "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" in front of a number of black men in white suits during a tribute to "Selma".
Bey then offered glimpses at her making preparations for the show in a behind-the-scenes video she shared on YouTube on Monday. In the eight-minute black-and-white clip, the shots of the 33-year-old diva rehearsing intersperse with ones of her explaining what the song meant to her and why she wanted to perform it at the Grammys.
"The first time I heard 'Precious Lord' I was a kid and my mother sang it to me and my mother played me Mahalia Jackson's version and she sang the song with her eyes closed, she was a vessel and it was like God speaking, using her body to speak and to heal," she says.
She then talked about her grandparents marching with Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights movement and her father becoming a part of the first generation of black men to attend an all-white school. "My father has grown up with a lot of trauma from those experiences. I feel like now I can sing for his pain, I can sing for my grandparents' pain. I can sing for some of the families that have lost their sons," she continues.
She goes on discussing why she wants to do the performance, adding, "I wanted to find real men that have lived, that have struggled, that have cried, that have a light and a spirit about them. I felt like this an opportunity to show the strength and vulnerability in black men."
