Grammy-winning powerhouse Mary J. Blige was moved to tears while watching a special performance of a medley of her hits by the youth Sing Harlem Choir at Glamour on Tuesday, November 7.
Blige, who was chosen as one of Glamour‘s Women of the Year for 2023, stood and clapped, visibly moved by watching the dozens of young people sing and dance to her hits like “Real Love” and “Family Affair.”
“That was amazing,” Blige said to the choir following the performance. “Thank you so much.”
The performance followed a rousing introduction by her friend actor Taraji P. Henson, who thanked her for providing an inspiration for girls and women like her.
“The first time I heard Mary J. Blige sing…I said, ‘That’s me! That girl is like me. She sounds like me, she is speaking the way my heart speaks.’ I felt seen,” Henson said. “And she wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable. She went ahead and made vulnerability her superpower.”
Visibly touched by the tributes, Blige took a second to look around the room and soak it in before beginning to speak.
“I’m speechless tonight,” she later said, shaking her head.
Blige then spoke about what the moment meant to her, eschewing her prepared speech for heartfelt and impassioned words from the heart.
“To all of you women out there, just keep loving on you—that’s it,” she said.
The Grammy winner has recently embraced a new, happier era of her life, and she knows that her present strength is because of, not in spite of, her past struggles.
“This is not an easy thing, this new me, this new Mary. This is hard work,” she told Glamour before issuing a warning: “When you’re happy and you’re strong, and you’ve been…[as] miserable as I’ve been in life and went through as much hell, it’s easy to revert back to the residue. It’s easy to revert back to the past because that’s what you knew. Because you know the pain of the past will always try to pull you back.”
