Tina Knowles, the mother of icons Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: the woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. A life of grief and tragedy, love and heartbreak, the nurturing of her superstar daughters, and the perseverance and audacity it takes for a girl from Galveston, Texas to change the world.

Why half of Destiny’s Child Beyoncé’s original four piece, left the group in 2000 in a flurry of bad-mouthing and lawsuits: we’re just old that “Beyoncé saw it as the end of a marriage of ten years”. The 2014 incident in which Solange was caught on CCTV attacking her sister’s husband the rapper Jay Z, while Beyoncé looked on. It happened only a glowing character reference for both her son-in-law as “true blessings, and I could not ask for better providers and protectors of my daughters and their children”.

As a black American born in 1954, Knowles grew up just a couple of generations removed from slavery. One of her neighbours as a little girl in the Texas town of Galveston was born a slave in 1870- after the emancipation decree, but while plantation owners were still happy to exploit the slow spread of news through the country.

Knowles’s parents and her deeply religious mother, Agnes, in particular- devoted themselves to keeping their seven children  ( the two eldest from Agnes’s previous marriage) safe without exposing them to the harsh truths of being black in the US south.

Knowles’s mother’s talent as a seamstress gave the family some protection, ensuring that her children always looked respectable and she was always useful. “Knowing how to sew gave us opportunities and security, but in the end, it was still bartering. My mother would teach me so much, but this was another lesson it would take me almost my whole life to unlearn” Knowles writes.

Tina married Matthew Knowles in 1980 and she becomes pregnant. A solitary, shy child, Beyoncé showed few early signs of stardom: when Knowles went to collect her from nursery one day, another girl pointed at Beyoncé and said “No one likes her.”

It was when Beyoncé was given the opportunity to sing and dance that she came alive. Tina, was running a successful salon as well as having inherited her mother’s fashion skills, became her daughter’s stylist, initially for pageants. Matthew took on the manager role and fortunately was good at it- otherwise, given his constant infidelities and rashness with money, it’s had to see why Knowles put up with him.

Knowles is keen to defend herself from accusations of pushy parenting. “It’s funny that people sometimes assume that I was some sort of stage mom. I was busy enough trying to be a mom, just like so many women I’ve met.” A cynic might say that to have one child become a global superstar may be regarded as misfortune, to have both do so looks like carelessness. However, it takes more than family ambition to achieve what Beyoncé and Solange have done, and Knowles is touchingly in awe of her daughters’ talent. 

By 2011 Knowles had enough of her philandering husband: the final straw came when he was served with paternity papers by one of the other women. Here, she’s strikingly wise about what a long marriage -even a strained one- can mean: “I lost not just a husband, but a witness to each other’s lives.” (Less wisely they had an affair between their separation and their divorce.

This intimate and revealing memoir is a multigenerational family saga and a celebration of the wisdom that women, mothers and daughters pass on to each other across generations.

Matriarch A Memoir by Tina Knowles, Dialogue £25, 432 pages.