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Beyoncé · S1 E1
Third Ward
The Houston neighbourhood that shaped Beyoncé's world before she was famous
A seven-year-old girl stands up in a church pew in Houston's Third Ward, singing loud enough to make the adults turn around. Nobody asks her to stop.
"Formation" (2016). Dropped the day before the Super Bowl with no warning. The video opens on a sinking police car in New Orleans, and every Houston reference, Red Lobster, hot sauce, Jackson Five nostrils, roots the song in the Southern Black identity Beyonce absorbed in the Third Ward.
Formation (2016)
"Formation" is an origin story disguised as a flex. Over a bouncing New Orleans beat produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, Beyonce rattles off signifiers of her Southern Black identity: hot sauce in her bag, negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils, cornbread and collard greens. The production borrows from bounce music, a genre born in the housing projects of New Orleans. She released it with zero promotion and performed it at the Super Bowl the next day.
The Third Ward
Beyonce Giselle Knowles was born on September 4, 1981, in Houston's Third Ward. The neighborhood is one of six historic wards established after the Civil War, and it has been a center of Black cultural life in Houston for over a century. Texas Southern University sits at its heart, along with the Ensemble Theatre, the oldest professional Black theatre in the American Southwest.
“I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I've never even been to the 'hood.”
— Beyonce
Third Ward, Houston
One of Houston's six historic wards. Home to Texas Southern University, the Ensemble Theatre, and the neighborhood where Beyonce grew up on Parkwood Drive.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Beyonce name her company after?
CHURCH GIRL (Beyonce)
From Renaissance (2022). Samples "Center of Thy Will" by the Clark Sisters, one of the best-selling gospel groups in history. The song plays with the tension between sacred and secular that is familiar to anyone who grew up in a Black church: joy, pleasure, and worship existing in the same room.
"Church Girl" samples a track by which legendary gospel group?
The Third Ward gave Beyonce a neighborhood, a church, and a name. But two people decided early on that she was not going to have an ordinary life. Next up: Mathew Knowles, a Xerox salesman from Alabama, and Tina Beyonce, a Creole hairdresser from Galveston.
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