Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Night the Music Died. Cissy Houston
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a job I’d had for several years, making electronics at the RCA plant in Elizabeth. And a few months after leaving Freddy, I gave birth to my first child—a five-pound, six-ounce baby boy, Gary Garland. I was a twenty-five-year-old single mother, and I had no idea what would happen next.
That summer, the Drinkards got the call that would end up changing my life. Ronnie Williams called with our biggest offer yet—to sing with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward at the Newport Jazz Festival.
The Drinkards had cut back on performing since Daddy had died, so Ronnie’s call came out of the blue. We were a little out of practice, and I was pregnant and showing, but somehow the Spirit was moving us that day. The crowd was huge, and they felt it, too—people rushed toward the stage, nearly mobbing us as we sang. It was a performance I’ll never forget, and later I thought how much I wished Daddy could have seen it—all those people being moved by music, by the Spirit, just as he always hoped.
Our performance that day at Newport led to a resurgence for the Drinkard Singers. Representatives from the RCA-Victor label offered us a contract, and we became the first gospel group to ever sign with that label. We released our first album, Make a Joyful Noise, in 1958, and after Joe Bostic began playing one of the cuts on his radio show, people started taking notice. Elvis Presley heard it and must have liked it, because he tried to convince us to record or tour with him—but of course Lee wouldn’t hear of it. With all of his famous hip-shaking and provocations, she wasn’t letting us anywhere near “Elvis the Pelvis.” Though we missed that chance to meet Elvis, another, much more important meeting was about to take place.
The success of Make a Joyful Noise led to an invitation for the Drinkards to perform on a gospel show broadcast every week from Newark’s Symphony Hall. And that’s what we were doing one Sunday morning when a tall, good-looking man was sitting in front of his TV at home, watching the show. The camera happened to zoom in on me for a close-up, and the man apparently liked what he saw. He knew a few musicians around town, so he asked one of them to introduce us.
And that was how I met John Houston.
When John showed up on the set of our Symphony Hall gospel show one morning in the spring of 1958, I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. I just knew that he was gorgeous—and that he was staring at me.
Later, it dawned on me that I’d first seen John about a decade earlier. He was an army MP then, and he’d come to the apartment building next to ours looking for someone who’d gone AWOL. I didn’t speak to him, and he didn’t notice me. But my friends and I all thought he was one of the most handsome men we’d ever seen. I was only fourteen, of course, and it may have been partially because of the uniform, but John made an impression the moment I saw him.
Ten years later, at Symphony Hall, I was even more impressed. John had light skin and fine features (his dad was part Native American), but what really struck me was how he carried himself—tall and well built, the man just exuded charisma. I was nervous as a schoolgirl when he walked over, but as we talked, he turned out to be not only smart and sophisticated but drop-dead funny, too. Even though he’d gone to the Seton Hall prep school in Orange, New Jersey, John was down-to-earth and real.
I loved the way he’d laugh and joke with me—and oh, how that man could talk! I could have listened to him all day. I’m not sure I believe in love at first sight, but if there is such a thing, it happened that day for me.
I was twenty-four when we met, and John was thirteen years older. The age difference didn’t matter to me, but my sisters Lee and Reebie didn’t like it. They thought he was robbing the cradle. And they were disgusted with me when they found out that, although separated, John was still married. By now, though, I had developed one very useful trait that has stayed with me my whole life: I never worried about what other people thought—even my own sisters. I liked John, and he liked me, so that was that.
John and I started going out, and pretty soon—well, we did wrong. We began living together, moving into an apartment on Eighth Street in Newark. I knew what we were doing was wrong as long as John was still married, but we were just so much in love. He loved kids, and was so good with my son, Gary. And when I met his family, we hit it off, too. It may have been wrong, but it sure did feel right.
I was still working at RCA, singing with the Drinkards, and picking up a few dollars directing the choirs at New Hope and another small church. John was driving a taxi at night, and he sometimes drove those big rigs that hauled food and goods cross-country. We struggled to make ends meet while John looked for better work, but in those early years we were really happy. We’d laugh and cut up together like a couple of teenagers. And we were truly in love. Later on, I used to like to sing a song called “I Miss the Hungry Years,” and you know, sometimes I still do. They really were good ones.
Right from the start, John and Gary and I were a family, and soon we met a neighbor who would also become like family—the woman who would become my best friend. Ellen White was a single mother with four children when she moved in across the hall from us. John invited her over for coffee one day, and we started spending all kinds of time together. Though her given name was Ellen, I took to calling her Bae—short for “Baby.” I wasn’t close to too many people, but Bae and I got to be like sisters, and Nippy and my sons would come to know her as “Aunt Bae.” From those humble beginnings a lifelong friendship was born, and Bae would eventually see us through the highest and lowest points of our lives.
John was still working on getting his divorce, and while he always enjoyed driving the taxi and those big rigs, he also had greater ambitions. About the time we moved in together, he started talking about some big ideas he had for the Drinkards. He believed we were good enough to make it big on the gospel circuit, if we’d just branch out and travel more. If we gave up our day jobs, he said, we could compete with popular gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, the flamboyant Alex Bradford, and Clara Ward.
My sister Lee, who was managing our group, wasn’t buying into John’s big dreams. Like my father, she saw gospel singing as ministry, not as a road to fame and fortune—so although she liked John and knew he loved the Drinkards, she was wary of his ambition. She was also put off by his occasional irreverence, as John wasn’t above laughing at the fake “healings” of holy rollers. Once, Lee even threw him out of a Pentecostal church when he couldn’t stop laughing and making comments in the back pew.
But John felt that with his managerial skills, gift of gab, and knowledge of the gospel circuit, he could successfully manage a singing group. Lee wasn’t about to let him get his hands on the Drinkards, so he had to look elsewhere. As it turned out, my nieces Dionne and Dee Dee—who sang in the New Hope choir and occasionally with the Drinkards—had gotten together with two other girls to form a group called the Gospelaires. John saw his opening, and he began taking the Gospelaires around to churches and gospel shows.
One evening, while he was sitting backstage at the Apollo Theater with the Gospelaires and a few other performers, another musician came in and asked if anyone knew some backup singers he could hire for a recording session. John said, “Sure, I do!”—and just like that, he got the Gospelaires the gig. That was the beginning of Dionne and Dee Dee’s career as backup artists. And that was also how John officially became their manager.
Finally, John was right where he always wanted to be, in the middle of the action. He just loved sitting around joking with the moneymen, producers, and musicians, and his easy manner with executives and artists allowed him to get Dionne and the group some fantastic session work. By the early 1960s, they were working with the legendary producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Henry Glover, and artists such as the Drifters, Dinah Washington, Ben E. King, the Coasters, and Solomon Burke. They made good money, but the real money was in being a solo artist. And that’s what John wanted me to pursue.
“Cissy,” John would tell me, “I can help you do that!” He was always pressing me, reminding me how much money I could be making. He had big ideas about my future in the business, but to his frustration, I just wasn’t interested. I had a good job at RCA, and by then I’d been there for more than ten years, so I had some seniority—something that meant a lot to Depression babies like myself. Also, there was a part of me that was just plain stubborn: I wasn’t going