Cissy Houston: soul singer who shepherded daughter Whitney’s career
Grammy-winning soul singer who backed everyone from Elvis to Aretha before shepherding her daughter Whitney’s career
Cissy Houston deserves to be remembered as a talented gospel and soul singer who backed Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin and David Bowie and won a brace of Grammy awards under her own name.
Yet the world will recall her most as a proud mother who shepherded her daughter Whitney to superstardom; and then as a tragically grieving one who buried her only daughter, who died at the age of 48 after she was found unconscious in a hotel room bathtub.
Cissy had made repeated interventions in an attempt to save her daughter from drug addiction. She persuaded her to enter rehab and on at least one occasion obtained a court order to force her to seek treatment.
Houston subsequently published a memoir about her daughter and on The Oprah Winfrey Show movingly described how she had learnt of her daughter’s death in a phone call from her son Gary Garland, who sang backing vocals on stage with his half-sister. “He was screaming, ‘Mom, Mommy,” she told Winfrey. “Oh, God. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’” He spluttered “Nippy, Nippy”, using the family’s childhood nickname for Whitney. ‘They found Nippy.’”
“I said, ‘Is she dead?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Mommy, she’s dead.’ And I don’t remember too much else after that.”
A week later a distraught Houston helped to organise a four-hour funeral service at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, where she served as choir director for half a century. Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys were among those who sang tributes.
Three years later, she directed the choir at another funeral at the church, this time for her granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, Whitney Houston’s daughter who, in an eerily similar tragedy, was found unresponsive in a bathtub at her home. Put into a coma, she died six months later at the age of 22.
Along with her oldest son, Gary, from her first marriage to Freddie Garland, she is survived by her son Michael, who was his sister’s tour manager, from her second marriage to John Houston, who managed his wife’s career. Both marriages ended in divorce. Another son, John, from her first marriage, predeceased her in 2021.
Cissy Houston was born Emily Drinkard in Newark in 1933, the last of eight children of Delia Mae (nee McCaskill) and Nitch Drinkard, a factory worker. Nicknamed Cissy from childhood, she began singing at the age of five with her sister Anne and brothers Larry and Nicky as the Drinkard Four, performing regularly at the New Hope Baptist Church. Later renamed the Drinkard Singers, they appeared at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1951 in a gala of gospel music.
After losing her mother to a cerebral haemorrhage when she was eight and her father when she was in her teens, she went to live with an older sister, Lee, mother of the singers Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warrick and who became the Drinkard Singers’ manager.
In 1963, when she was pregnant with Whitney, Cissy joined her cousin Dee Dee in the vocal group the Sweet Inspirations, replacing Dionne who had embarked on a successful solo career.
Switching from gospel to a secular R&B style, the group became in-demand backing singers heard on records by Wilson Pickett (In the Midnight Hour), Van Morrison (Brown Eyed Girl), Jimi Hendrix (Burning of the Midnight Lamp), Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Elvis Presley among others.
Houston launched a solo career in 1969, recording throughout the 1970s while continuing to sing backing vocals for the likes of Paul Simon (Mother and Child Reunion), David Bowie (Young Americans) and Roberta Flack.
By the end of the decade Whitney was singing with her mother - but as Cissy’s singing met with polite applause Whitney’s voice brought the house down. Mother went on to sing backing vocals on many of her daughter’s recordings, including the No 1 hits How Will I Know and I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
It led to a revival in her fortunes as a solo artist as Cissy returned to her gospel roots, winning Grammy awards in the late 1990s for the albums Face to Face and He Leadeth Me.
Although she never got over her daughter’s death, she found some consolation in her faith. “She was raised well, she knew better, and whatever took her to that position, I really don’t know,” she said of her daughter. “I trust in God. His ways are not our ways so we have to go with that.”
- Cissy Houston, singer, was born on September 30, 1933. She died after a long illness on October 7, 2024, aged 91
The Times