How Whitney Houston’s Voice Was Destined to Fight the Power
A child of her mother church, trained by mom Cissy Houston and a legendary extended family, the singer became America’s idol
In April of 2018, at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, WA, I presented this essay to the Annual MoPOP Pop Conference. At that time, director Kevin Macdonald’s documentary film Whitney, with its revelations of childhood abuse, had not been released. In the film’s wake, I’m now posting this essay, edited slightly, as my contribution to the continuing discussion.
At an early age, Whitney Elizabeth Houston was nicknamed “Nippy,” after Nippy Nibbs, a kicky, mischievous 1970s English comic-book character. She was bestowed with the name — which was used by close friends and family throughout her life — by her dad John Houston, a WWII veteran, truck driver, and hardcase manager of his wife’s, and later, his daughter’s singing career. Nippy was a giddy blur, teasing fate with abandon. Once, at age four, she plunged a clothes hanger down her throat.
Her mother Cissy Houston, an acclaimed and in-demand gospel and soul singer, was doing vocal sessions right up until the day her water broke; she returned to work just months after Nippy’s birth. Friends and neighbors helped watch the kids — older brothers Gary and Michael were also holy terrors (first introducing Whitney to drugs) — but John Houston positioned himself as Nippy’s protector, pampering her like his instigating angel, as she entangled her siblings in silly schemes, then skated away, beaming.
In her loving but turf-defending 2013 book Remembering Whitney, Cissy Houston recalls how, on grueling tours, her daughter would sometimes play-act as her own guardian. She would wearily announce to backstage intimates, “Okay, it’s time to go be Whitney Houston” or “I’m tired, it’s time to put Nippy to bed.” This self-awareness was also reminiscent of how, as a pre-teen, she could play the shy, pigtailed church girl who wore plaid skirts and wanted to please everyone; or the fearless scamp who played with her brothers in Newark, New Jersey’s blackened ruins after 1967’s fiery, six-day “reckoning” (as poet Amiri Baraka described it), the uprising that broke out in response to malign neglect and police abuse in Newark’s Central Ward, where the Houstons lived.
At age 11, Whitney slid out of the choir loft at Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church and performed her first solo, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” The hymn references the Old Testament’s Exodus story of struggle through “barren lands” to freedom and redemption beyond. Whitney learned it from her choir-directing mom, who had heard perhaps the definitive version as a young back-up singer for Mahalia Jackson in the 1950s. Years later, in a 1990 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, Whitney replied to the question, “Do you remember the first song you ever sang in church?” by spontaneously levitating the audience with thirty a cappella seconds of the hymn.
But as a skinny kid onstage at New Hope Baptist, her knees quaked until the congregation roared, until they made real her previously fanciful desire to be an entertainer like her first musical hero, Michael Jackson. Maybe, she mused, being a singer was her truest self, as it was for her mom.
Born Emily Drinkard, Cissy Houston sang with her sisters and brothers in the raucously devout family group the Drinkard Singers, which later included Cissy’s nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (who had also been members of the New Hope Baptist choir). The Drinkards were such a force in the world of gospel that by 1951, when Cissy was only 18, they’d already performed at Carnegie Hall. In 1958, they released the first gospel album on a major label, a recording of their appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. Around the time of Whitney’s birth in 1963, Cissy formed the four-woman vocal group the Sweet Inspirations, who would go on to record five albums together, charting both R&B and pop singles. They were even more revered as back-up singers, on record and live, famously collaborating with Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, but also with Van Morrison, Bette Midler, Jimi Hendrix, Dusty Springfield, David Bowie, the Bee Gees, and countless others.
By the time teenaged Whitney decided to go pro — which she knew meant consenting to her mom’s no-pain-no-gain tutelage — Cissy had left the Sweet Inspirations. The Houston family, with money from an advance for Cissy’s 1970 debut solo album, had settled into the middle-class Doddtown neighborhood of East Orange, New Jersey. Cissy served as choir master at New Hope Baptist and was a frequent guest vocalist at New York-area churches. She was a memorable presence on other artists’ records (due to her ability to ease between genres) and at New York jazz and soul clubs. She took Whitney everywhere and the kid eagerly soaked up wisdom from “Aunt Ree” (Aretha Franklin), surrogate older sis Chaka Khan, and close family friends Roberta Flack and Gladys Knight. She learned of the older women’s struggles and studied them as they sang — pacing, breathing, intonation, how to work a microphone. She also started performing live with her mother.
In 1976, Cissy’s dormant solo career got a boost from Michael Zager, producer behind the anthemic disco smash “Let’s All Chant” (the “your body, my body, everybody work your body” song). They would team for three albums, scoring a №5 dance hit in 1977 with the sleek, conga-and-horn-laced “Think It Over.” This led to a 14-year-old Whitney singing back-up on her mom’s Zager-produced 1978 album, also titled Think It Over, and recording the peppy disco trifle “Life’s a Party,” for Zager’s own album of the same name. Zager saw a potential star, as did an Arista Records rep who offered her a contract; family friend Luther Vandross, an early supporter, was interested in producing her. But Cissy was no thirsty, wide-eyed stage mom.
As a black woman in the music business from the 1950s forward, Cissy had faced racism, sexism, and the realization that if you weren’t extraordinary in an expeditiously profitable manner, you could be discarded. Even though Cissy had repeatedly proven that she could facilitate hit records in virtually any style, she never got the support that a white artist with a remotely similar resume would’ve received. She was in no rush to see her sensitive, trusting daughter get pounded by the industry gauntlet. So, vocal boot camp continued at New Hope choir practice and in the basement studio of the Houston home.
Whitney was now regularly doing club dates with Cissy, plus singing back-up on records by Lou Rawls, Chaka Khan, and the Neville Brothers. During a New Jersey vocal competition, she muffed her timing while performing Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born),” a recent №1 pop hit, and lost to a girl who sang “The Greatest Love of All,” a recent №2 R&B hit for George Benson. Yes, that “Greatest Love of All.” Whitney immediately worked up a magisterial version of the song and soon stamped it as hers. By the time she graduated from high school in 1981, she had also signed with the Click and Wilhemina modeling agencies, appearing on the cover of Seventeen.
But as Whitney’s professional success confirmed her own instincts and choices, the foundation she’d depended on at home, which had become more fragile over the years, finally crumbled. After her parents divorced, 18-year-old Whitney moved out of the Doddtown house and in with her best friend Robyn Crawford, who would go on to become her closest personal and professional confidante, against the harsh objections and ongoing disapproval of her mother. But Whitney did not waver, and made it clear to Cissy that Robyn was going to be a vital part of her life.
Now, I’ve taken a particular path to this point in the narrative for a very specific reason. Because this is where the mansplaining usually kicks in, where an apocryphal fable invariably unfurls. This is where the key man, the guru, the hierophant, the Music Man, capital “M” capital “M,” appears. A man with the secret, third-eye knowledge to guide our Child Diva to Canaan’s Land and, as his generous bequeathment to humanity, to fully desegregate pop along the way. A man known for hearing the ka-ching of artistry in acts like Blood Sweat & Tears and Air Supply when everyone else heard buffoonery and treacle. The Ultimate Arbiter of Cost-Effective Quality: Davis Comma Clive. Ears Comma Golden. Harvard Law, Columbia, Arista. The guy who (claims he) made Barry Manilow a superstar.
The Music Man saw Whitney perform at Manhattan’s Sweetwater’s club in 1981 and, well, he was late, so he mostly just saw her close with “Greatest Love of All.” But according to his personal folklore, Clive Davis perceived so much rough, untapped potential in this bony child of the streets that he signed her to a contract on the spot, and set about sending her to the world’s finest singing, acting, locution, and etiquette classes, while completely overhauling her wardrobe, hairstyle, and makeup. Then, after two years of arduous artist development, he sifted through material, musicians, and producers, finally coaxing Whitney through the delicate process of making a Classic Record That Changes the World But Is Also Loved by Mee-Maw. Finally, in 1985, he deemed the album Whitney Houston — ten songs produced by four different men — ready for release. The rest you can read about in the Clive Davis Day Spa and Library at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Okay, you may think this is outrageous, even sacrilegious fanfic, but considering the lack of acknowledgement for the literal Dream Team of women responsible for helping Whitney get to the point where it was the general consensus that she would not just become a pop success, but a transformative artist who could speak her spiritual truth to a universe of listeners, maybe not so much. Also, before Clive Davis took over, Whitney’s cousin Dionne Warwick had already connected her with a management company, which booked the first work she’d ever done independent of her mom — high-profile TV commercials, as well as features on low-key-cool records, including Material’s “Memories” with jazz saxophone greast Archie Shepp in 1982; and a 1983 collaboration with disco vet Paul Jabara, who co-wrote and produced the Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men.”
Certainly, the Houston family knew that they needed industry assistance for Whitney to achieve her dreams; but it wasn’t necessarily the sort of help that flattered Clive Davis as a musical swami. They needed an insider, a White Man, specifically, who could deftly navigate, or boldly elbow his way through, the music business’ corrupt shithouse bureaucracy. Davis, the corporate hustler who worked a room like Zubin Mehta conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, was that White Man. Davis’ genius lay in greasing the skids. He knew how to persuade the right people within the machine that the machine would function more effectively for everyone if it were tilted in his client’s direction. Arista offered Whitney a modest deal upfront, but a war chest for promotion. As the Houstons knew from his celebrated successes at Columbia Records — working with Janis Joplin, Santana, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, et al. — Davis knew exactly which skids to grease (despite being fired in 1973 for misuse of funds and possible payola).
Playing to her strength, three of the first four singles from Whitney Houston’s debut album were ballads — “You Give Good Love” was a №3 pop hit; “Saving All My Love for You” reached №1 (later winning a Grammy); and “Greatest Love of All,” which Davis advised her not to record, also went to №1 and was nominated for a Grammy; another ballad, “All at Once” was never released in the U.S., but was a substantial hit in Europe and Japan. Due to his public shepherding of the project, Davis was loudly proclaimed a mastermind. This is the equivalent of an NBA team signing Lebron James and patting themselves on the back for deploying him as their primary playmaker. No shit, Clive. Give Whitney the damn ball! It was plainly obvious that her voice could harness a magnificent, almost tidal power; she had the range to take a ballad to places that most singers couldn’t even envision.
Also, Davis’ big-budget roll-out — personally presenting Whitney as his flawless princess — bred doubt and resentment from her peers, while sacrificing much of her humanity and history. Still, she became an instant pop star. Didn’t his plan work? A better question might be, how did Whitney make his plan work? Maybe she wasn’t able to directly give us “knowledge of her particular black female pain,” due to the packaging of her music, as critic Doreen St. Felix wrote in a review of Whitney: Can I Be Me?, Nick Broomfield’s scab-poking 2017 documentary. But soon after Houston’s death, Daphne Brooks argued for a broader view, asserting that Whitney “staged a struggle on the battlefield of song and cemented her title as the voice of the post–Civil Rights era,” adding that her most compelling story “resides in a voice that… defiantly, regally, and audaciously weaves its way through a world of both legislated racial equality and lingering systemic discrimination.”
She did this by making the pop ballad her dominion. With that voice — resolute and regal amid the darkest heartache — she was not just the latest crossover phenomenon, a Diva born from a rib of Michael Jackson. She was a generational rip in the fabric. When you scroll through the history of American pop ballad singing — Tin Pan Alley operatic sentiment, blues and murder ballads’ mini-dramas of systemic violence, jazz’s expressive nuance, on into 1960s and ’70s gospel/soul maximalism — there have always been singers elevated to sovereign status. Ballad singing tends to be a do-or-die realm; do you have the technique, power, and emotion to rate? Do you have a voice worthy of comparison to Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Little Jimmy Scott, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Nina Simone, Otis Redding, George Jones, Percy Sledge, Al Green, Gladys Knight?
In the last half of the 1980s, Whitney Houston was next up. On both those ballads and her omnipresent buoyant dance-pop plaints (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody [Who Loves Me]”), her voice didn’t just break demographic barriers, but became viewed as perhaps our finest symbol of American soft power — bright, assimilated, optimistic, indomitable. From her exultant live performance of “One Moment in Time” at the 1988 Olympics in South Korea to her moonshot performances of the “Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl and the 1991 HBO concert Welcome Home Heroes with Whitney Houston, which honored the troops of Operation Desert Storm, she gave America a good reason to feel exceptional.
But it’s rarely noted that the commercial music business in the U.S. at that time had been aggressively engineered for more than a decade to promote white rock dudes (or white pop dudes who could pass as “rock”) — over, say, black soul and R&B singers — as America’s heavyweight champ balladeers. The entire concept of the “Power Ballad” began to emerge in the late-1960s/early-1970s as the industry scrambled to monetize the ambitions of white rock bands (i.e., their belief they could pull off slow songs about something approaching vulnerability). We don’t know who first concocted the term, or who she was trolling. But from the early 1970s into the early 1990s, the “Power Ballad” became a crucial industry hustle for white male rockers seeking to diversify the appeal of their portfolio — meaning, songs that women would listen to at home. Croak out a tear-jerkin’ ballad and the radio promo staff really put their back into it.
Featuring noble, existential quests and birds flying free and pretty mamas putting poor boys in trick bags, Power Ballads supposedly revealed a more vulnerable side of hetero white men who trashed hotel rooms for a living. But in practice, it was mostly about guys grandiosely searching for meaning or needing a comforting pat on the head or simply wanting to flee and leave responsibility behind, none of which did much for women or anybody else. A more accurate name for these songs might’ve been Phallus Ballads or Fail Us Ballads or Blow Me and Save Me Ballads.
This was the skewed pop world Whitney Houston encountered. Women singing pop ballads in the ’80s played a typically submissive role, pleading for or celebrating male affection. In Karyn White’s 1989 ballad “Superwoman,” the singer confesses that she is not super and needs “more than occasional hugs.” Of course, there were exceptions. In “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),” Tina Turner demanded a more evolved dystopia (one presumably not overseen by a sadistic dwarf); on “I Found Someone,” Cher defiantly broadcast her union with tabloid beefcake Rob Camiletti; and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a thunderous bombing run of despair piloted by Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman.
But from her 1985 debut up to the soundtrack for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, in which she co-starred, Whitney vaporized all contenders, while destroying the myth that white rock dudes were an essential source of power for pop ballads. Instead, the Power Ballad became her Olympic decathlon, a showcase event for her superior training and skills — her mastery of melodic interpretation, melisma, and improvisation; her ability to craft a story through dynamics, pacing, and space; her ability to project her voice with mesmerizing resonance and authority. Her only credible peers were Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, women who clearly envied or worshiped her. She soared above and unceremoniously dunked all over the oafish sentiment of hair-metal/neo-grunge bros who bellowed at their inner children on mountaintops or in the middle of deserts. Then, with her prodigious revamping of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for The Bodyguard — featuring what has been dubbed the Greatest Key Change of All — she became a demigoddess who set a towering new standard for vocal prowess.
Since Whitney flipped the game, women now sing “Power Ballads” as a matter of course. Basically any slow crescendo’ing love song qualifies, whether it’s by Beyonce or Adele or Lady Gaga or Carrie Underwood or Selena Gomez. It’s the status quo. It’s American Idol or The Voice. And far too often, it’s simply a perfunctory bit of show-offery, bereft of any spiritual power to tingle the soul. Despite the number of booming declarations of romantic yearning and loss in Whitney Houston’s catalogue, there were few perfunctory moments and no instances where she conceded defeat. She was too invested in transcendence. She could communicate a swirling, hopeless black hole of pain, while still signifying resilience and faith. Her voice was never broken.
It’s fitting that one of the final songs Whitney recorded was the gospel standard, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” for her 2012 reboot of the 1976 film Sparkle (which she starred in and executive produced). As disapproving matriarch Emma — whose singing career was derailed by partner abuse and addiction — she struggles to discipline her choir-girl daughters, who secretly form a Supremes-ish singing group, which is ultimately derailed by partner abuse and addiction. While Whitney’s born-again Christian mom can’t protect her daughters, she does begin to reconcile with them. The parallels to Whitney and Cissy’s relationship are unavoidable and brutal.
Certainly, Whitney’s “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” is not her finest moment, but it’s not “hoarse” or “raspy,” as critics charged at the time. And as she acts out her performance of the track in Sparkle, it’s riveting. “Why should I feel discouraged? / Why should the shadows come? / Why should my heart be lonely? / And long for my Heavenly home?” she entreats. The answer and the song’s metaphor are inspired by Jesus’s counsel to his disciples in the New Testament’s Gospel According to Matthew: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” In other words, don’t fret over your small, fragile, earthly life because you’ll always be protected by the Lord’s benevolent spirit. Popularized by Ethel Waters and, most notably, Mahalia Jackson, whose galvanizing performances of the song linked it directly with the Civil Rights Movement, this was no random song choice.
“I sing because I’m happy / I sing because I’m free,” the song goes, and whatever that meant to Whitney in her last days, it’s a powerfully definitive statement.
Life offstage and out of the studio diminished Whitney Houston. Too many people only think of her as broken. In his 2018 documentary Whitney (the first authorized by the family), Kevin Macdonald makes the case that the singer and her brother Gary were sexually molested by cousin Dee Dee Warwick, who as mentioned above, sang alongside Cissy Houston in both the New Hope Baptist choir and gospel group the Drinkard Singers (Cissy has rebuked the film). If true, no wonder Whitney couldn’t reconcile her inner conflicts or find a truer self to fortify her against the fame that eventually haunted every aspect of her life. Still, when Whitney’s voice imbued a ballad, she could illuminate the cosmos. Nothing nullified her truth.
In the grand American tradition, she triumphed over a rigged game, then paid the price.
Rest in power, Nippy.
Charles Aaron is a Writer/Editor based in Durham, N.C. Connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
