Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Night the Music Died. Cissy Houston
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What I never anticipated was that, in trying to give my children a better life and shield them from hardships, they might end up less prepared to face the kind of trauma that life inevitably throws your way. My childhood toughened me up. But my children—especially Nippy—never developed that same toughness. And that would cause even bigger problems later.
A few months after Nippy was born, I began going back into New York for session jobs. I was making good money, but John had been having problems finding steady work, so much of the time he stayed at home with the kids. Most days, he’d fix Gary’s lunch and send him off to school, then drive me into the city for work. He’d spend the rest of the day taking care of Michael and Nippy, and then come back to pick me up when my session was finished.
John was good with the children and loved them all, but Nippy was his princess. Even before she could walk, she was a cutup, always knocking things down or getting into some kind of mischief. When he took her out to the porch for some air, he’d cover her with a blanket to keep warm, but she’d rustle around and throw it right off and he’d have to keep running out to put it back on. It was around this time that John started calling her “Nippy,” after a comic strip character who was always getting into trouble. Pretty soon, we all were calling her Nippy.
She was such a beautiful child—and smart, too. She started walking when she was just six months old. John and I couldn’t believe it. And of course, once she began walking she just got into more trouble. She was always teasing and messing with Thor, the German shepherd we’d gotten for the kids. John used to watch her grab that big old dog with her tiny hands and just laugh. He’d tell me stories when I got home from work, and I was jealous that he got to spend so much time with the kids. But of course, I had to work to support the family.
In the spring of 1964, almost a year after Nippy’s birth, John’s divorce was at last finalized, and he and I were able to get married. John and I had known since the beginning of our relationship that we wanted to be together, but it was a relief to make it official. Now I had a husband, a family, and a home—and soon, I’d have myself a new singing group, too.
At the recording studios in New York, our backup group’s reputation kept growing—even as the faces began changing. My niece, Dionne Warwick, went on to her solo career, and soon afterward her sister Dee Dee started to dabble in solo performances, too. Dee Dee sang with us up to 1965, when she signed a deal with Mercury Records, but then we had to replace her. I tried out a lot of different singers, and finally I was able to put together the group and sound I’d been looking for. That group would become known as the Sweet Inspirations, also known as the Sweets.
Sylvia Shemwell, Myrna Smith, Estelle Brown, and I made up the original Sweet Inspirations, a name Atlantic gave us in January 1967. I had just cut a single with Kapp Records, and I guess Jerry Wexler wanted to make sure that I didn’t follow Dionne and Dee Dee and leave for another label, so Atlantic offered our group a contract. At first, the executives wanted to name us the Inspirations, because of our gospel background. But when they discovered another group had already taken that name, they changed it to the Sweet Inspirations.
Our beginnings were humble, but the Sweet Inspirations would end up changing the world of background singing. It all began in 1967, when we were chosen to work with Aretha Franklin on her newest record.
In some ways, I felt I knew Aretha before we even met. As a child I had listened to her father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, on the radio, and years later the Drinkard Singers had performed on programs where Aretha was featured. Her records may not have had the sophistication of Hal David and Burt Bacharach songs, but they had something else, a gospel fire that was missing in most popular music. Like me, Aretha—who I called “Ree”—had grown up in the church, so we shared that sensibility. We just understood each other, musically and otherwise.
I loved that gospel fire in her songs, and we loved singing with each other, as something magical always seemed to happen. Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records called it “a communal thing”: I’d spend a lot of time working out the background parts on Aretha’s tunes, and she’d give me the freedom to put my two cents in. All that time I’d spent learning from producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller paid off when I started improvising our backup parts—something background singers just didn’t do at that point.
When I first started doing background, session singers would come in, sing whatever the producers told them to sing, and go home. But the Sweets began shaking things up. For one thing, although most groups had three members, I added one more, a fourth voice that would double the part that I sang on top, but an octave lower. That low fourth voice made for a much fuller sound than other backup groups had—and nobody at the time figured out what we were doing to make that sound.
We also started changing the parts that we were given to sing. I wasn’t pushy about it—we’d sing whatever parts they gave us. But if something didn’t work as well as it could have, I’d ask if we could try something a little different. And most of the time they’d say, “Okay, Cissy, do what you do.”
So I’d ask them to play a track, and I’d listen until I got a feeling for where the song was going. I’d try different things in my head, and keep on listening until I felt I had something good. Then the girls would gather around and we’d go to work. I’d say, “Let’s try this,” and when we started singing together, that’s when things would really start to flow.
Usually, we’d have to change things around a few times until we got it right. I’d use the lyrics of the song, the story the songwriter was telling, to trigger things in my mind—it was kind of call-and-response. I’d listen to the melody and words, and then come up with a corresponding line that would bring out what the artist was singing about. It could be very simple—if the line was “Do you love me,” we might follow it with “Yes I do.” The goal in backup is to find a way to make a good song sound great. And the girls in the Sweets were right on it.
I always believed that you have to feel what you do—that you can’t just go in and sing words without really feeling the song. That was something I learned singing in church, so when I became a contractor and started putting together the singers for sessions, I chose people who came from backgrounds like my own—from the church. Producers liked what I was doing, and, after a while, they figured out that if they’d just let me handle it, the backgrounds were going to be outstanding. And that’s how background singing became a real industry, where people did more than just show up and go through the motions. It became a respected profession, and the Sweet Inspirations became the industry’s first-call background singers.
Of course, there were the occasional young producers who didn’t know us, who would say, “No, I’ll tell you what to sing.” I’d just nod my head and we’d do it the way we were asked. A lot of times, the artists would be laughing and whispering to themselves because they knew that the material and the approach weren’t even close to what we could have come up with. And even when those young producers tried to keep us in line, most of the time I’d find a way to get my own ideas into the songs.
So, that’s how it all began, with Aretha. Singing background for her felt special, because we had a real rapport together; I could feel what she was trying to do, and I riffed off that. All the songs we recorded during those early sessions, including “Chain of Fools,” “I Never Loved a Man,” and “Since You Been Gone,” ended up being big sellers.
But my favorites were “Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way,” which had one of the best background lines I ever sang. At first, we were stumped for ideas on “Ain’t No Way,” and then John suggested that I thread in a high solo part behind Ree’s lead. I thought he was crazy, but we tried it, and those lilting high notes provided the perfect contrast to the melancholy in her voice. Later, during a performance at Lincoln Center in New York City, the audience gave Ree and me a long standing ovation after we sang that song. It became one of my signature performances with her.
Great things started happening for the Sweets. We released our first single, the Pops Staples tune “Why Am I Treated So Bad,” and we also recorded with Van Morrison, doing the backup for one of my favorite songs, “Brown-Eyed Girl.” And although I didn’t want to go