Obituary for Cissy Houston | Soul

The career of American singer Cissy Houston, who has died aged 91, exemplified the life force that underlies so much modern popular music: the close relationship between African-American sacred and secular idioms, particularly the influence of black gospel music with its deep emotional roots and bursts of ecstatic passion, into the structure of R&B, soul and pop.

For 30 years, Houston served as “Minister of Music” at New Hope Baptist Church in her native Newark, New Jersey. But she also sang, often with her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, on many of the big pop hits of the 1960s and 70s, from the Drifters’ On Broadway to Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl to Aretha Franklin’s You Make Me Feel Like a ) Natural Woman, Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man and Paul Simon’s mother-child reunion to David Bowie’s Young Americans.

As a founding member of a singing group called Sweet Inspirations, she toured and recorded with Elvis Presley. After leaving the group in 1970 to support her family, she pursued a solo career, recording albums and performing in New York nightclubs, culminating in two Grammy awards for her traditional gospel album “Face to Face.” Year 1997 and “He Leadeth Me the” reached the following year.

She also became known as the mother of singer Whitney Houston, whose enormous worldwide success after her appearance in the 1992 film “The Bodyguard” drew attention to a personal life that included a turbulent marriage to singer Bobby Brown and problems with drug addiction.

Whitney, who began her singing career under her mother’s tutelage in the New Hope choir, was found dead in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub in 2012 at the age of 48. Three years later, Whitney’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, a singer and reality television personality, was found dead. He died at the age of 22 after being discovered in similar circumstances.

Cissy Houston was born Emily Drinkard, the eighth and final child of Delia Mae (née McCaskill) and Nitcholas “Nitch” Drinkard, natives of Georgia who moved to New Jersey in the 1920s. Delia died when Cissy – a childhood nickname that stuck with her – was eight years old, and her husband followed ten years later. Cissy lived with her married older sister, Lee Warrick, whose children included Dionne and Dee Dee, both just a few years younger than their aunt.

Cissy and her brothers and sisters were encouraged by their parents to sing in church almost from an early age. They formed a singing group, which Cissy joined at the age of five. “I was so angry,” she told Rolling Stone in 1978. “We played in the sun with the other children and my older sister Marie let us come to the rehearsal.”

The Drinkard Singers gained national fame and eventually performed at Carnegie Hall and the Newport Folk Festival. In 1954, Cissy took over the leadership of the New Hope choir, which grew from 15 to 60 voices over the course of her tenure.

She had a son, Gary, from her first marriage to Freddie Garland in 1955, but it ended in divorce. In 1964, she married John Houston, an Army veteran who became her manager and with whom she had two children, Michael and Whitney.

When her second marriage brought her a name change, she worked regularly as a background singer on pop recordings and was in great demand because of her three-octave range. With the two Warrick sisters (who changed their spelling to “Warwick”) and a friend, Doris Troy, she formed a group that was soon busy in New York studios providing backing vocals for hits by Solomon Burke, Chuck Jackson and to deliver to many others.

When all three of her colleagues left to pursue solo careers, she replaced them with Estelle Brown, Sylvia Shemwell and Myrna Smith. Among her regular employers was Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, who recruited her for sessions with Franklin, with Cissy providing the coloratura soprano flourishes on Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” in 1968. Wexler also gave them their name, which formed the title of their most successful single, Sweet Inspiration, a Top 20 hit when it was released on Atlantic in 1967.

While raising her children, Cissy continued to record and occasionally perform. Although she made several solo albums for various labels and producers, she was never able to match the solo success of the Warwick sisters or Troy. But when Burt Bacharach recorded his own versions of some of his biggest hits in 1971, he chose them to sing One Less Bell to Answer, Mexican Divorce and All Kinds of People. In 1976, she appeared in Gospel Fuse, a gospel opera composed by Carman Moore and performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

On the 1989 album Whitney, which sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, she sang a duet with her daughter on “I Know Him So Well” from the musical Chess. In 1992, she and Jackson reunited for a lovely R&B album called “I’ll Take Care of You.” As she achieved her Grammy-gospel success, secular music took up less of her time, although she did record a song with Whitney and Dionne Warwick called “Family First” for the 2006 Hollywood romantic comedy “Daddy’s Little Girls.”

In 1998, she published her autobiography, How Sweet the Sound. Fifteen years later, in Remembering Whitney, she told the harrowing story of her long but futile struggle to help her daughter overcome her various problems.

Both marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her two sons, six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.