Cissy Houston, singer and Whitney Houston’s mother, dies aged 91

The acclaimed gospel singer sang with Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Dionne Warwick and Elvis Presley. She collaborated with her daughter Whitney, who died in 2012 aged 48.

Cissy Houston, a two-time Grammy-winning soul and gospel artist who sang with Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, and knew triumph and heartbreak as the mother of Whitney Houston, has died aged 91.
Cissy Houston died Monday morning in her New Jersey home while under hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease, according to her daughter-in-law Pat Houston.
“Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness. We loss the matriarch of our family,” Pat Houston said in a statement. She said her mother-in-law’s contributions to popular music and culture are “unparalleled.”
“Mother Cissy has been a strong and towering figure in our lives. A woman of deep faith and conviction, who cared greatly about family, ministry, and community. Her more than seven-decade career in music and entertainment will remain at the forefront of our hearts.”
A church performer from an early age, Houston (born Emily Drinkard) was part of a family gospel act before breaking through in popular music in the 1960s as a member of the prominent backing group The Sweet Inspirations with Doris Troy and her niece Dee Dee Warwick. The group sang backup for a variety of soul singers including Otis Redding, Lou Rawls and The Drifters. They also sang backup for Dionne Warwick.
Houston’s many credits included Franklin’s ‘Think’ and ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and Dusty Springfield’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.
The Sweet Inspirations also sang on stage with Presley, whom Houston would remember fondly for singing gospel during rehearsal breaks and telling her that she was “squirrelly.”
“At the end of our engagement with him, he gave me a bracelet inscribed with my name on the outside,” she wrote in her memoir “How Sweet the Sound,” published in 1998. “On the inside of the bracelet he had inscribed his nickname for me: Squirrelly.”
The Sweet Inspirations had their own top 20 single with the soul-rock ‘Sweet Inspiration’, made in the Memphis studio where Franklin and Springfield among others recorded hits and released four albums just in the late ’60s. The group appeared on Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and sang background vocals for The Jimi Hendrix Experience on the song ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’ in 1967.
Houston’s last performance with The Sweet Inspirations came after the group hit the stage with Presley in a Las Vegas show in 1969. Her final recording session with the group turned into their biggest R&B hit ‘(Gotta Find) A Brand New Lover’ a composition by the production team of Gamble & Huff, who appeared on the group’s fifth album, ‘Sweet Sweet Soul’.
After the group’s success and four albums together, Houston left The Sweet Inspirations to pursue a solo career where she flourished.
Houston became an in-demand session singer and recorded more than 600 songs in multiple genres throughout her career. Her vocals can be heard on tracks alongside a wide range of artists including Chaka Khan, Donny Hathaway, Jimi Hendrix, Luther Vandross, Beyoncé, Paul Simon, Roberta Flack and Whitney Houston.
Cissy Houston went on to complete several records, including ‘Presenting Cissy Houston’, the disco-era ‘Think It Over’ and the Grammy-winning gospel albums ‘Face to Face’ and ‘He Leadeth Me’.
In 1971, Houston’s signature vocals were featured on Burt Bacharach’s solo album, which includes ‘Mexican Divorce’, ‘All Kinds of People’ and ‘One Less Bell to Answer’. She performed various standards including Barbra Streisand’s hit song, ‘Evergreen’.
Cissy Houston would say that she had discouraged her daughter from show business, but they were joined in music for much of Whitney’s life, from church to stage performances to television and film and the recording studio. Whitney’s rise seemed inevitable, not only because of her obvious talents, but because of her background: Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were cousins, Leontyne Price a cousin once removed, Franklin a close family friend.
Whitney Houston made her debut on national television when she and Cissy Houston sang a medley of Franklin hits on The Merv Griffin Show. Cissy Houston sang backup on Whitney’s eponymous, multi-platinum first album, and the two shared the lead on ‘I Know Him So Well’, from the 1987 mega-seller ‘Whitney’.
They would sing together often in concert and appeared in the 1996 film The Preacher’s Wife. Their most indelible moments likely came from the video for one of Whitney’s biggest hits from the mid-1980s, ‘Greatest Love of All’. It was filmed as a mother-daughter homage, ending with a joyous Whitney exiting the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and embracing Cissy Houston, who stood in the wings.
But drug problems damaged Whitney’s voice and reputation and eventually ended her life: she was found dead in a Beverly Hills bathtub on 11 February 2012. Cissy Houston would blame husband Bobby Brown for Whitney’s getting so “deep” into drugs, writing in the 2013 memoir “Remembering Whitney.” Brown acknowledged his drug problems but was dismissive of his in-laws in a 2016 interview with Larry King.
In 2015, Cissy Houston was grieving again when granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only child of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, was found unconscious in a bathtub, spent months in a coma and died at age 22.
Cissy Houston was briefly married to Freddie Garland in the 1950s and was married to Whitney’s father, entertainment executive John Russell Houston, from 1959-1990.