Cissy Houston, who sang in a church choir as a child before emerging as an in-demand backup vocalist on pop and soul records and then as a gospel star, and who helped shepherd her daughter Whitney Houston to superstardom, died on Monday at her home in Newark. She was 91.
Her family announced her death in a statement, which said she had been in hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. Houston was a gifted stylist whose powerful voice and deep faith made her an influential figure in gospel circles for decades. She won Grammy Awards in the traditional soul gospel category for the albums “Face to Face” in 1997 and “He Leadeth Me” in 1999.
Before then, she had been among the busiest backup singers in the record business, providing vocal support for Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and many others. And for more than a half-century she was the choir director for the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where she got her start as a singer in the 1930s.
Ms. Houston was the matriarch of a singing dynasty that included her daughter, her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and a cousin, the opera star Leontyne Price. She endured the deaths of her daughter, who drowned in a hotel bathtub in 2012, and of Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, who, in an eerily similar tragedy, was found unresponsive in a bathtub in her Georgia home in January 2015 and died six months later. Whitney Houston had struggled with addiction for many years despite her mother’s intervention.
Unlike her daughter, Cissy Houston achieved wider fame in her later years, but she was comfortable with that. As she told Jet magazine in 1998: “A lot of the things I’ve done have come late in life, and it’s like a whole new career starting up. I don’t have regrets about the way I planned and lived my life, and I am very proud of what I’ve become.”
On her own or with her group the Sweet Inspirations, Ms. Houston can be heard singing backup on such hits as Ms. Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman,” Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By.”
She was pregnant with her daughter while recording backup vocals for the Drifters’ “On Broadway” in 1963, according to her autobiography, “How Sweet the Sound: My Life With God and Gospel” (1998), written with Jonathan Singer.
“This was bound to be an interesting child,” she wrote.
Robert Darden, a professor of journalism at Baylor University and the author of several books on gospel music, said Ms. Houston was “a significant figure not because she sold a lot of records, but because of the people she influenced who did sell a lot and because of her work as a sustainer and nurturer of the gospel music tradition.”
“Whitney Houston was trained by the best,” he continued, in an interview for this obituary in 2015, “and though she had a once-in-a-lifetime voice, without the training and influence and experience of someone like Cissy, who knew everybody and who could sing in any style, she would not have achieved what she did.”
Cissy Houston was born Emily Drinkard in Newark on Sept. 30, 1933, the last of eight children of Nicholas Drinkard, a factory worker, and Delia Mae (McCaskill) Drinkard. Her family attended revival-style weekday services, where they first encountered gospel music.
Cissy began singing, along with her siblings, at age 5 in local churches, and she, her sister Anne and her brothers Larry and Nicky formed the Drinkard Four, a quartet that performed regularly at the New Hope Baptist Church. The group, renamed the Drinkard Singers, was featured in a Carnegie Hall performance in 1951 that starred Mahalia Jackson.
Ms. Houston’s marriage to Freddie Garland in 1955 ended in divorce. She later married John Houston, with whom she had three children.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Houston was a prominent member of the Sweet Inspirations, a sought-after R&B group that sang backup on hundreds of songs for a wide variety of artists including Wilson Pickett, David Bowie, Neil Diamond and even, on one song, Jimi Hendrix.
Eager to pursue a solo career, she left the group in 1969. On her own she made recordings and performed at nightclubs, appeared on “The Tonight Show” and, in 1983, joined the cast of an Off Broadway musical, “Taking My Turn.”
Reviewing a performance at the New York nightclub Reno Sweeney in 1977, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote: “With her absolutely majestic voice, exemplary intonation and economical, almost self-effacing phrasing, Miss Houston is a singer’s singer. To resurrect an old cliché, she could sing the telephone book and provide an uplifting experience.”
Ms. Houston eventually began devoting most of her time to raising her children and to directing the church choir at New Hope Baptist. She encouraged Whitney in her early singing and frequently brought her into the recording studio.
As Whitney’s career skyrocketed, the mother and daughter occasionally performed together; Cissy Houston lent her backup vocals to Whitney Houston hits like “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
Ms. Houston’s survivors include her sons, Gary Garland, from her first marriage, and Michael Houston, as well as a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Interviewed by The Times in 1983 about her appearance in “Taking My Turn,” a musical about aging, Ms. Houston described her musical inspiration. “It’s all coming from inside me,” she said. “What I feel is what I sing.”
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