Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s eldest daughter, Blue Ivy, has one of the most unique names in celebrity kid history — but her parents almost called her something else.
During a recent interview with Gayle King, Jay-Z revealed that the original plan was to name Blue in honor of his hometown, New York City. “It was supposed to be Brooklyn,” the rapper, 53, explained in a CBS Mornings clip published on Friday, October 27.
As the parents-to-be attended prenatal checkups, however, a new name came to mind. “We was calling her Blueberry. Like, ‘Look at the little blueberry,’” Jay-Z recalled. “You know, it was like a nickname. It just was natural.”
Eventually, the nickname started to feel more real, and Jay-Z and Beyoncé, 42, decided to make it official. “We just took the ‘berry’ off of it and called her Blue,” he explained.
Jay-Z — whose real name is Shawn Carter — married Beyoncé in April 2008. The couple became parents in January 2012 with the arrival of Blue, now 11. They later welcomed twins Rumi and Sir, 6, in June 2017.
Prior to Blue’s arrival, Beyoncé suffered a miscarriage that she discussed in the 2013 documentary Life Is But a Dream. “About two years ago, I was pregnant for the first time,” she recalled in the film. “And I heard the heartbeat, which was the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life.”
While she was still in the early stages of pregnancy, however, her doctor discovered that the baby no longer had a heartbeat. “Literally the week before I went to the doctor, everything was fine, but there was no heartbeat,” Beyoncé recalled, adding that she then went into the studio and wrote “the saddest song I’ve ever written in my life.”
In 2019, Beyoncé hinted in a subsequent interview that she suffered more than one pregnancy loss. “I began to search for deeper meaning when life began to teach me lessons I didn’t know I needed,” she said in an interview with Elle. “Success looks different to me now. I learned that all pain and loss is in fact a gift. Having miscarriages taught me that I had to mother myself before I could be a mother to someone else.”
While Beyoncé and Jay-Z have mostly kept Rumi and Sir out of the spotlight, Blue has recently become a star in her own right, dancing during select dates of her mom’s Renaissance World Tour this past summer.
According to Jay-Z, it was Blue’s idea to perform on the tour, but she didn’t get a free pass for being Beyoncé’s daughter. “She wanted to do it the first night, and we was like, ‘OK, if this is something you wanna do, you can’t just go out there. You gotta go work with the dancers, and go work,’” Jay-Z told King, 68. “And she worked every day, and [we] watched her work hard.”
