Singer Cissy Houston performs onstage during the 2012 BET Awards in Los Angeles, California.
Michael Buckner/Getty Images For BET
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Michael Buckner/Getty Images For BET
Singer Cissy Houston performs onstage during the 2012 BET Awards in Los Angeles, California.
Michael Buckner/Getty Images For BET
Cissy Houston, a singer whose career began in childhood and spanned generations and genres from gospel to pop, has died. As a child, Houston performed with her siblings, and she later sang backing vocals with Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison and more. She was also a renowned solo gospel artist and the mother of one of the biggest pop and R&B stars in the world, Whitney Houston. She was 91 years old.
Houston was born in 1933, as Emily Drinkard, in Newark, N.J., to a musically gifted family. As a child, she was expected to perform at local churches with her brothers and sisters.
“I was 5 years old and they had to put me on a stool in order to see me,” she told WHYY’s Fresh Air in 1998. “Of course, at 5 years old, I wanted to be out playing with everyone else and it was difficult for me. There was no question. I didn’t have a choice.”
Her family group, The Drinkard Singers, became one of the first groups to release a gospel album on a major record label. A Joyful Noise was released in 1959 by RCA Records.
In the 1960s, Houston decided she wanted to sing secular music and formed the group The Sweet Inspirations. Under Houston’s leadership, it earned a reputation as one of the best background groups in the business, appearing on hundreds of songs and helping to shape classics ranging from Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” to Dusty Springfield’s “Son of A Preacher Man.”
The group’s first album, the self-titled The Sweet Inspirations recorded in 1967, peaked at No. 12 on Billboard‘s Hot Soul Albums, and its crossover hit single “Sweet Inspiration” reached the top 20 of the Hot 100 singles chart.
Along with Sylvia Shemwell, Myrna Smith and Estelle Brown, Houston sang backup for Jimi Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, The Drifters, Wilson Pickett and Houston’s niece Dionne Warwick, who was once part of the group with her sister Dee Dee Warwick, before each became a solo artist.
An innovative musician, Houston used four background voices rather than the standard three and doubled her top part to enrich the sound. She explained her process to Fresh Air using the song “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” by Aretha Franklin, as an example.
“‘Natural Woman’ was like … you try to enhance what she’s done. That’s the gist of doing background,” Houston said. “A lot of times, backgrounds make songs and really sell them.”
Still, after spending a lot of time in the background, Houston was ready for the spotlight. “I was becoming an artist in my own right and that’s when I left The Sweet Inspirations and became a single artist,” Houston said.
She was also torn between professional demands and being a mom. Long hours and touring across the country kept her from seeing her children as much as she desired. She had two sons, Gary Garland and Michael, and a daughter, Whitney, who would go on to be one of the biggest pop stars of all time.
Cissy and Whitney Houston were famously close. Their relationship was also one of mentor and protégé.
“She’s my mom. She’s my friend. She’s my teacher,” Whitney Houston explained on Entertainment Tonight in 1987. “She’s like a little gas station. When you need some strength, you just go to Mom, and she fills you.”
Whitney died when she was only 48, after years of battling addiction and a notoriously troubled marriage. In 2013, Cissy Houston wrote a book, Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped. The memoir upset her granddaughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who would later also die tragically at the age of 22. In a since-deleted tweet, Brown expressed her anger. “I find it 2b disrespect2mymother & me being her daughter won’t tolerate it,” she wrote.
The memoir’s treatment of rumors about Whitney Houston’s closeted lesbian relationship also led to a memorable moment with Oprah Winfrey.
“Would it have bothered you if your daughter, Whitney, was gay?” Winfrey asked Cissy Houston in a 2013 interview on OWN’s Next Chapter.
“Absolutely,” Houston replied.
“You wouldn’t have liked that at all?” Oprah pressed.
“Not at all,” said Houston.
Houston stayed true to her roots in other ways. For more than 50 years, through triumphs and tragedies, Cissy Houston led the Youth Inspiration Choir at her hometown Baptist church in Newark.