Cissy Houston’s Music Was Not Just a Footnote to Whitney’s
The late Luther Vandross was 12 or 13, he recalled in a 1982 interview, when he first fell in love with Cissy Houston. Or at least Cissy Houston’s voice.
“When I first became aware of Dionne Warwick and Aretha,” he said, “I could always spot if the same backup singers were on their records. Like Aretha’s ‘Ain’t No Way’ had the same voices as on Wilson Pickett’s ‘Mustang Sally.’
“I came to find out it was the Sweet Inspirations and Cissy Houston’s voice. I thought it was obvious. It had that tonality.
“There was never a better girl group than the Sweet Inspirations.”
Cissy Houston, who died Monday at the age of 91 after a long stretch of Alzheimer’s, might not have made that bold a postulation about her voice or the Sweet Inspirations, a quartet of wonderful voices who sang gospel and pop music on their own and as background singers became the secret weapon on hundreds of pop records.
But while Cissy was best known to much of the world as the mother of Whitney Houston, with all the triumphs and tribulations that came to incorporate, she had a first-class musical career and history of her own.
In the gospel world, she started with her siblings as the Drinkard Sisters, bearers of the torch carried by the likes of Mahalia Jackson and Marian Williams. After she launched a solo career, she won two Grammys for gospel albums. In between all that, she spent 49 years as musical director of the choir at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark N.J.
“Whatever I was doing, I tried to be there every Sunday,” she said in a 1990 interview. Whitney sang some of her first public notes in that choir, and while it was clear she had a voice that could take her places, Cissy didn’t let her get too confident too soon. When the teenage Whitney got a little overexuberant with a solo spot one Sunday, Cissy tucked her back into the group for a spell, making it clear there was only one star in this room and that was Jesus.
Cissy herself, both with the Sweet Inspirations and solo, crossed what had often been a great divide between gospel and popular music. The “Sweets” backed Elvis Presley, Aretha, Dionne, David Bowie, Otis Redding, the Drifters, Dusty Springfield, Jimi Hendrix and George Benson, among many others. That’s the Sweet Inspirations behind Van Morrison on “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
“When I started, people still talked about God’s music versus the devil’s music,” Houston recalled in 1986. “To me, it’s all music. You can’t separate music. It’s all about love. In gospel, it’s love of God. In popular music, it’s love of people.”
Cissy Houston recorded a number of secular songs over the years, without a lot of chart success. That included her version of Jim Weatherly’s “Midnight Train To Georgia” recorded a year before Gladys Knight took it to №1 on the pop charts in late 1972.
Houston’s version isn’t totally different from Knight’s. But where Knight’s has a full pop production — prominently including a background chorus — Houston’s showcases her gospel roots. It’s a terrific vocal whose power and inflection, ironically, may have made it just a little less attractive to radio programmers.
Houston expressed some quiet frustration over that derailed shot and others, suggesting she sometimes didn’t get the promotion her music deserved.
“I’m not regretful of anything in my career,” she said in 1986. “I haven’t had [great] status, but I’m known all over the world. I’ve done all I had to do. My record companies haven’t done all they could.”
While Cissy became increasingly known as the mother of Whitney once the 1980s rolled on, she never stepped back from her own career. In 1990 she talked about how she was finally recording an album of gospel songs by the great Thomas A. Dorsey, who started as a rather raunchy blues singer and later turned to the Lord with songs like “Peace In the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” She won her Grammys in 1996 and 1998.
Along the way she recorded a number of tracks with Whitney, some of them gospel, and she mused in 1986 that she was as proud of Whitney’s success as she was of her own.
“God has a plan and maybe that level of success wasn’t for me,” she said. “Maybe it was for my daughter and sons. That’s what mothers are for.
“A lot of people have tried to take my style. Who better than your own daughter? It’s great. Sometimes her voice can be scary to me, like hearing yourself. I listen to her and I get chills.”
Cissy and Whitney clearly shared one of those fierce mother-daughter bonds it’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t part of one. That bond can also get tested, with the stakes rising higher when both are living the high-profile life of public figures.
Since Cissy had spent much of her life in the music game and knew its traps, she was asked in 1986 if she were concerned about Whitney plunging into it.
“There are times when you want to protect her,” she said. “You bet. But it’s a very defeating feeling because you can’t protect her all the time. Not because you don’t want to, but probably because kids don’t always want to believe you anyway.
“There are people who could hurt her.”
That concern felt purely theoretical in 1986, when the newly famous Whitney came across as the quintessential good girl, a polite charmer with an otherworldly voice.
Thirteen years later, the concern had become real and urgent. With Whitney married to bad-boy singer Bobby Brown and increasingly showing signs of erratic behavior, Cissy orchestrated an intervention over Whitney’s drug use. While Whitney denied having a problem then, in 2009 she confessed to Oprah Winfrey that for a time drugs had become consuming and corrosive. She also told Oprah that Cissy’s interventions had eventually convinced her to clean up. In February 2012 Whitney died with, among other things, cocaine in her system.
The Houston family, including Cissy, said little in public to feed media fascination with Whitney’s struggles and death. One imagines there were spells of tension in the mother-daughter relationship over the years, and very likely moments of desperation for Cissy. The burden doubtless became no lighter when Whitney’s only child, Bobbi Kristina, died in 2015 under circumstances eerily similar to those of her mother.
So before Alzheimer’s began drawing the curtain for Cissy Houston, one hopes she appreciated the better times, recognized she had created an extraordinary rainbow of music and found reconciliation in her faith that there would indeed, someday, be peace in the valley.
