Coco Jones hopes to inspire the next generation of girls who look like her.
On the red carpet for Sunday’s 66th Grammy Awards, Jones, 26, spoke with E! Live from the Red Carpet host Laverne Cox on how it feels to be a first-time Grammy nominee.
“Honestly, so many emotions,” Jones said. “I’m really trying to keep everything together. I think I’m just thinking about everything that got me here. And that makes me emotional.”
“I just want to continue to inspire girls who look like me to keep following because none of this would have happened if I had given up and I’m just thankful that I didn’t,” she added.
Jones won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance. She was also nominated in four other categories at the ceremony: Best R&B Album for her EP What I didn’t tell youbest R&B song for her hit single “ICU”, best traditional R&B performance for her Babyface collaboration “Simple” as well as best new artist.
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Musician and Bel-Air star recently spoke with PEOPLE about her reaction to her first-ever nomination.
“I slept on the plane and you have wifi on, so iMessages still work. I kept feeling this vibration and I was like, ‘God, this plane is going through some turbulence,'” Jones told PEOPLE in December 2023. “Then I looked at my phone, and I got all these notifications saying, ‘Congratulations!’ Of course I was a geek.”
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Jones rose to fame on the Disney Channel with roles in the movie Let it shine and shows such as So random! and Good luck Charlie. She shared that her continued success comes amid a positive shift in representation in the entertainment industry.
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“I definitely feel like the industry for dark-skinned black women is getting better and better, especially since I was a young girl,” Jones told PEOPLE. “And I think the more stories and the more positions of power that are told from the perspective of a woman of color, the more opportunity there is [there are] for women to play those roles and to hire women who would understand those stories.”
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Watch PEOPLE’s full coverage of the 66th Grammy Awards as it airs live on CBS from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
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