Los
Angeles Times February 28, 1995
Mom Can Carry a Pretty Mean Tune
Background singers are, figuratively speaking, the unsung
heroes of music.
You can hardly imagine most of Elvis Presley's greatest
recordings without the Jordanaires - but can you name a
single member of that backing group?
Or can you name any of the Sweet Inspirations? That's the
female quartet whose gospel-derived exultation shaped the
sound of '60s soul, spiking, among many, "Respect," "Chain
of Fools," and virtually every other Aretha Franklin hit
from the era.
Well, you might know one of the Sweet Inspirations, but
that's probably because she happens to be the mother of
Whitney Houston.
"Oh yeah!" says Cissy Houston, sitting at the foot of the
bed in a Universal City hotel room, in town to tape an
installment of the "Leeza" talk show dealing with celebrity
moms.
"I'm the mother of a superstar now - people take that
into consideration."
But when the elder Houston is give a Rhythm & Blues
Foundation Pioneer Award on Thursday at the Hollywood
Palladium, it will be for her own accomplishments - not her
daughter's.
The award, one of a dozen that will be made by the
organization, serves as long-due recognition for Houston,
who founded the Sweet Inspirations in 1967 with Sylvia
Shemwell, Myrna Smith and Estelle Brown.
"We used to sit and say, 'You know, people never mention
us,' " says Houston, 61. "But Aretha never would have had
all those hits if the background wasn't so good."
So, you'd think nothing would have made Houston happier
than helping launch her daughter on the road to stardom.
Nope.
"I didn't want her in the business," Houston says. "I had
seen what it could do to you, how people are ready to hurt
you."
Nonetheless, Cissy cultivated her daughter's talents,
using her in both studio sessions and in club shows in New
York while Whitney was still a teen.
"I remember one night, I was maybe 17, I was at the
beauty parlor getting my hair done and my mother called,"
said Whitney, now 31, in a phone interview from Arizona on
location for the movie "Waiting to Exhale."
"I had been working with her for some time and we were
supposed to do a show that night at Mikell's club," Whitney
continued. "She called and sounded hoarse and said, 'My
voice! I can't sing! You'll have to do it without me.' I
said, 'Forget it! I can't do that!' She said, 'Of course you
can, you're good.''
Whitney did just fine. But when she called her mother,
she discovered the whole thing had been a set-up - Cissy's
voice was fine.
Recalled Whitney, "She said, 'Well, I was kinda sick, but
I really had to show you that you could do this and if
that's what you want, you have to go do it.'"
Whitney knew that she wanted to be a singer from the
earliest times she saw her mom at work.
" I remember every time that my mother would
[sing] with Aretha it was like being in church or at
home swinging with the family," Whitney recalled.
It was, in fact, at church and at home that Cissy (born
Emily Drinkard) learned to sing.
"We sang in our house all the time, but strictly gospel,'
the mother recalls of her early years as the youngest of
eight children born and raised in Newark, N.J., where she
still lives. "Singing anything else - the devil's music -
was unheard of.
She and other family members formed the Drinkard Singers,
which in 1957 became one of the first gospel groups to
perform at the Newport Folk Festival. An RCA gospel album
from the festival. "A Joyful Noise," raised the group's
star. But it wasn't enough for Cissy to give up her day job
at RCA's cathode tube factory.
In the early '60s, her then-husband, John Houston,
started managing Dionne Warwick and other New York session
singers. (He now manages Whitney.) But when composer Burt
Bacharach turned Warwick into his star singer, Houston had a
void in his business.
"My husband lost his top voice," Cissy says, "So I
stepped in to take her place - and never stopped working
since."
It was out of that work that the Sweet Inspirations
formed, becoming a constantly in-demand unit, appearing on
numerous hits by Warwick, Wilson Pickett, the Drifters,
Dusty Springfield and Solomon Burke, among many others. And
the quartet had its own hit in 1968 with the sultry "Sweet
Inspiration." The singers also become part of Presely's
backing group on many shows following his 1969 comeback.
There was some consolation for the lack of recognition in
that Houston had something many other R&B singers
lacked: steady work and career longevity. She was able to
transcend numerous upheavals in music styles in the '70s and
'80s, doing sessions for the likes of Chaka Kahn and Luther
Vandross.
Today, thanks to her superstar daughter, Houston can be
choosy about work, though she still enjoys doing sessions on
occasion and in 1992 teamed with the veteran singer Chuck
Jackson for the album "I'll Take Care of You." In recent
years she has also been the CEO of the Whitney Houston
Foundation for Children and has added acting to her resume,
with roles in several TV dramas and sitcoms and in the Off
Broadway play "Taking My Time."
"I'm doing most of the acting things just to see if I can
do it," she says. "You grasp that moment in time and just
keep on going. I don't think there's anything I can't do. I
know that through Christ all things are possible."
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