Cissy Houston, a two-time Grammy-winning gospel singer who was the mother of late pop titan Whitney Houston, died Monday. She was 91.
In a statement to The Times, the estate of Whitney Houston said that the matriarch, who performed with Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, died Monday morning in her New Jersey home while under hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease. She was surrounded by family.
“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,” Pat Houston said in the statement. (Pat is married to Cissy Houston’s son, former NBA player Gary Houston.)
“Her contributions to popular music and culture are unparalleled. We are blessed and grateful that God allowed her to spend so many years with us and we are thankful for all the many valuable life lessons that she taught us. May she rest in peace, alongside her daughter Whitney and granddaughter Bobbi Kristina and other cherished family members,” she said.
Born Emily Drinkard in Newark, N.J., on Sept. 30, 1933, Cissy Houston was the youngest of eight children. She attended New Hope Baptist Church and later became its minister of sacred music.
Before that, however, she launched her show business career as a youngster when she, her sister Anne and brothers Larry and Nicky formed a gospel group in 1938. Together, the Drinkard Four recorded one album.
When her sisters Lee and Marie joined the group, they became known as the Drinkard Singers and performed at Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., in 1957. They recorded the live gospel album “A Joyful Noise” at Webster Hall in New York City and released the album in 1959 through RCA Records, becoming one of the first gospel groups to release a gospel album on a major record label.
Cissy Houston, the aunt of singers Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (the daughters of her sister Lee), later moved on to the vocal group the Sweet Inspirations, which featured her, Dee Dee Warwick and Doris Troy. They recorded four albums; they also sang backup for Otis Redding, Lou Rawls and the Drifters and appeared on Van Morrison’s hit “Brown Eyed Girl.” They contributed background vocals on “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” in 1967 for the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Houston became a sought-after session singer, working with Redding, Wilson Pickett and Dusty Springfield. When she left the Sweet Inspirations in 1969, she signed to Commonwealth United Records and released her debut solo LP, “Presenting Cissy Houston,” with the chart-topping cover singles “I’ll Be There” and “Be My Baby.”
In 1971, she was featured on Burt Bacharach’s self-titled solo album and performed various standards, including Barbra Streisand’s hit song “Evergreen.”
Cissy Houston was surrounded by vocal powerhouses who imprinted on her daughter and was said to be Whitney Houston’s biggest inspiration. Aretha Franklin, who included Cissy on her 1968 song “Ain’t No Way,” was Whitney Houston’s godmother.
Houston performed frequently at New York clubs including Mikell’s, Sweetwater’s, Seventh Avenue South and Fat Tuesday from the late 1970s through the 1980s. It was then that she presented Whitney and her voice, first as a backup singer and then as a soloist, readily passing the torch when her daughter brought down the house. The two also performed duets of “Ain’t No Way,” with her daughter filling in for the late Queen of Soul.
After forays into other genres and continuing as a session singer, Cissy Houston returned to her gospel roots in the 1990s. Her traditional soul gospel albums “Face to Face” and “He Leadeth Me” earned her Grammy Awards in 1997 and 1998, respectively.
After her daughter’s death in 2012, she wrote the memoir “Remembering Whitney” in an effort to strip away rampant speculation surrounding the “I Want to Dance With Somebody” singer’s untimely demise in a hotel bathtub the day before the Grammy Awards. (Whitney Houston’s death was ruled an accidental drowning, although some cocaine was found in her system and was believed to have played a role. History appeared to repeat itself in 2015 when Houston’s granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown died in a similar fashion.)
Cissy Houston shared her guilt over how long it had taken her to become aware of Whitney‘s “partying” and substance abuse, which ultimately torpedoed her career.
“The truth is, back then I didn’t really want to know about it,” she wrote in the book, explaining how their relationship worsened with her daughter’s drug use.
“Should I have done things differently? Was I a good mother? Was I too hard on her?” she wrote in the book’s epilogue. “And the worst one of all — Could I have saved her somehow?”
Houston was married briefly in the mid-1950s to Freddie Garland and then from 1964 to 1991 to theatrical manager John Russell Houston Jr., who died in 2003. She had three children, Gary, Michael and Whitney, and several grandchildren.