Grammy-winning singer Cissy Houston, the mother of the late icon Whitney Houston, has died at the age of 91.
Houston’s death on Monday (October 7) morning comes 12 years after the tragic death of Whitney, who died aged 48 in 2012 from accidental drowning.
Houston died at her New Jersey home while under hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter-in-law Pat Houston told The Associated Press.
“Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness. We loss the matriarch of our family,” Pat said in a statement.
“Mother Cissy has been a strong and towering figure in our lives. A woman of deep faith and conviction, who cared greatly about family, ministry, and community. Her more than seven-decade career in music and entertainment will remain at the forefront of our hearts.”
Born Emily Drinkard in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, Houston began her singing career in 1938 at the age of five when she and her siblings Anne, Larry and Nicky formed the gospel singing group The Drinkard Four.
Anne Drinkard Moss, Marie Drinkard Epps and Lee Warwick, the mother of singers Dionne Warwick and Delia Juanita “Dee Dee” Warwick, later joined and the group was renamed The Drinkard Singers.
In 1958, the group went on to record a live album, A Joyful Noise, becoming one of the first gospel groups to release music with a major recording label.
It wasn’t until 1963, just before she was about to give birth to Whitney, that Houston formed the Sweet Inspirations with R&B singer Doris Troy and her niece Dee Dee.
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Together, the group performed backup vocals for several major artists, including Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding and Houston’s other niece Dionne.
After years of singing backup, Houston embarked on a solo career in 1970 and released multiple studio albums, including her Grammy-winning soul gospel albums Face To Face (1996) and He Leadeth Me (1997).
She also authored three books: He Leadeth Me (1997), How Sweet The Sound: My Life with God and Gospel (1998) and Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Life, Loss and The Night The Music Stopped (2013).
In a previous interview about the latter, Houston recalled being “a wreck” when she received word of Whitney’s – whom the family referred to as Nippy – death.
“My son called me and he was screaming, ‘Mom, Mommy,’” Houston told Oprah in 2013. “Then, oh God. I said, ‘What is wrong, what’s wrong?’ He just said, ‘Nippy. Nippy.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with Nippy?’”
“‘They found Nippy.’ I said, ‘They found her what, what?’” Houston said. “And I was getting annoyed because he wasn’t telling me anything.
“He said, ‘Mommy – ‘ I said, ‘Is she dead?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Mommy, she’s dead.’ And I don’t remember too much else after that.”