Cissy Houston, the deceased’s mother Whitney Houston and a two-time Grammy winner who has performed alongside superstar musicians like Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklinhas died, CBS News has confirmed. She was 91 years old.
Houston died Monday morning in her New Jersey home while being treated for Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter-in-law Pat Houston said in a statement. The famous gospel singer was surrounded by her family.
“Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness,” Pat Houston said in the statement, calling her mother-in-law “the matriarch of our family.” She said Cissy Houston’s contributions to popular music and culture are “unparalleled.”
“Mother Cissy was a strong and towering figure in our lives. A woman of deep faith and conviction, who cared greatly for her family, her ministry and her community. Her career spanning more than seven decades in music and entertainment will remain at the forefront of our hearts.”
A church performer from an early age, Houston was part of a family gospel group before breaking into popular music in the 1960s as a member of the prominent backing group The Sweet Inspirations with Doris Troy and his niece Dee Dee Warwick. The group has performed for a variety of soul singers, including Otis Redding, Lou RawlsThe Drifters and Dionne Warwick.
Houston’s numerous credits include 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 onstage with Presley, who Houston would fondly remember for singing gospel during rehearsal breaks and telling her she was “squirrel.”
“At the end of our engagement to him, he gave me a bracelet with my name written on the outside,” she wrote in her memoir “How Sweet the Sound,” published in 1998. “A l Inside the bracelet, he had written his nickname for me: Squirrelly.”
The Sweet Inspirations had their own top 20 with the soul-rock “Sweet Inspiration”, made in the Memphis studio where Franklin and Springfield, among others, recorded hits and released four albums in the late ’60s. The group is 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 final performance with the Sweet Inspirations came after the group took the stage with Presley during a show in Las Vegas in 1969. His 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, which appeared on the group’s fifth album, “Sweet Sweet Soul”.
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During this time, the band occasionally performed live concerts with Franklin. 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 over 600 songs in several genres throughout her career. Her voice 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 her daughter.
Houston went on to record several records, including “Presenting Cissy Houston,” the disco-era “Think It Over” and the Grammy Award-winning gospel albums “Face to Face” and “He Leadeth Me.”
In 1971, Houston’s iconic voice was 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.”
Never far from his native New Jersey and his musical roots, Houston for decades presided over the 200-member Youth Inspirational Choir at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where Whitney Houston sang as a child.
Cissy Houston would say she had discouraged her daughter from going into show business, but they were associated with music for much of Whitney’s life, from church to stage performances to television, the cinema and the recording studio. Whitney’s rise seemed inevitable, not only because of her obvious talents, but also because of her background: Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were cousins, Leontyne Price a once-distant cousin, Franklin a close family friend.
Whitney Houston made her national television debut when she and Cissy Houston sang a medley of Franklin hits on “The Merv Griffin Show.” Cissy Houston sang backing vocals on Whitney’s self-titled, multiplatinum debut album, and the two shared lead vocals on “I Know Him So Well,” from the 1987 mega-seller “Whitney.”
They often sang together in concerts and appeared in the 1996 film “The Preacher’s Wife.” Their most indelible moments probably came from the music video for one of Whitney’s biggest hits of the mid-1980s, “Greatest Love of All.” It was filmed as a mother-daughter tribute, ending with a joyful Whitney emerging from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and kissing Cissy Houston, who was standing backstage.
On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found dead – from what was ruled an accidental drowning – in a Beverly Hills bathtub. Cissy Houston will write about her daughter in the memoir “Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Life, Loss and The Night The Music Stopped.”
In 2015, Cissy Houston was in mourning again when granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only daughter of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, was found unconscious in a bathtub, spent months in a coma and died at 22. The family was back in the news in 2018 with the release of the documentary “Whitney,” which contained allegations that Dee Dee Warwick (who died in 2008) molested Whitney when she was little.
Cissy Houston was briefly married to Freddie Garland in the 1950s; their son, Gary Garland, was a guard for the Denver Nuggets and later sang on many of Whitney Houston’s tours. Cissy Houston was married to Whitney’s father, entertainment executive John Russell Houston, from 1959 to 1990. In addition to Whitney, the Houstons also had a son, Michael.
Cissy Houston was born Emily Drinkard in Newark, the youngest of eight children of a factory worker and a housewife. She was just 5 years old when she and her three siblings founded the Drinkard Singers, a gospel group that lasted 30 years, performing on the same band as Mahalia Jackson, among others, and releasing the 1959 album “A Joyful Noise.”
She later said she would have been happy to stay in gospel, but John Houston encouraged her to work in the studio. When rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins (along with drummer Levon Helm and other future members of The Band) needed an extra voice, Cissy Houston stepped in.
“I wanted to finish my work and do it quickly. I was there, but I didn’t have to be part of it. I was in the world, but I was not of the world, as St. Paul said . say it,” Houston wrote in “How Sweet the Sound,” remembering how she soon began working with the Drifters and other singers.
“At least in the recording studio we lived together as God intended. Some days we spent 12 or 15 hours there together,” she wrote. “Deep racial barriers seemed to collapse as we worked side by side to create our little pop masterpieces.”
Pat Houston said she is grateful for the many valuable lessons learned from her mother-in-law. She said the family felt “blessed and grateful” that God allowed Cissy to spend so many years with them.
“We are touched by your generous support and outpouring of love during our profound time of grief,” Houston said on behalf of the family. “We respectfully request our privacy during this difficult time.”
