Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American singer and actress, commonly referred to as The Voice. The youngest child of American singer Cissy Houston, she was born in Newark, New Jersey, and moved to East Orange, with her family at age seven. Houston began singing at her mother's church, New Hope Baptist Church, and started to lead its junior choir at the age of twelve. At fourteen, Houston entered the music business first as a background singer for her mother during Cissy's cabaret club performances in downtown Manhattan and then as a session vocalist, where she backed industry artists such as Lou Rawls, Chaka Khan and the Neville Brothers among others.
Occasionally during this era, Houston was allowed to take the lead vocal during Cissy's shows and received her first standing ovation at The Town Hall and recorded her first lead vocal with disco music producer Michael Zager at fifteen. In 1980, she began a successful career in modeling, landing the cover of Seventeen in 1981. Houston's music career picked up a year later in 1982 when she recorded full lead vocals on songs by Material and Paul Jabara.
After auditioning for Elektra Records and CBS, Houston eventually signed to Arista Records in 1983. While recording her debut album, she entered the record charts in 1984 with American R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass on the love ballad, "Hold Me” and appeared with Jermaine Jackson on an episode of As the World Turns. Reaction to Houston's debut album upon its release in early 1985 was slow at first but picked up after she performed the single, "You Give Good Love", on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Her ascension to superstardom culminated with the success of her Grammy Award-winning debut album and the international success of the 1987 hit "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)".
Childhood in Newark and East Orange
Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born on August 9, 1963, in Newark, New Jersey, to Emily "Cissy" (née Drinkard) and John Russell Houston Jr. at Newark Presbyterian Hospital. Houston's mother discovered she was pregnant with her around the same time Houston's cousin Dionne Warwick made her chart debut with the R&B hit "Don't Make Me Over" in December 1962.
On the day of Houston's birth, her mother Cissy was reportedly recording background vocals with the Drifters at Atlantic Studios and was "well past her due date". Upon her arrival, her mother initially didn't believe she had a daughter as she had given birth to two boys. When her then-boyfriend John told her they had a daughter, she felt John was "joking around" until a nurse confirmed the baby's identity.
Houston got her first name from actress Whitney Blake, one of the main stars of the 1960s sitcom, Hazel, one of Cissy's favorite shows to watch at the time, and her middle name from her paternal grandmother Sarah Elizabeth Houston, a schoolteacher in the New York area.
Houston's father John was of African American, Lenape, Scottish and English descent and was the great-great-grandson of Jeremiah Burke Sanderson, an abolitionist, schoolteacher and civil rights activist. Her mother Cissy was of African American heritage with some English and Irish descent. Cissy once claimed in an interview to have partial Dutch and Native American descent. Houston's maternal descendants were landowners in Blakely, Georgia, one of the few black families to do so at the time. The Drinkards later moved to Newark during the Great Migration in the early 1920s.
Houston was the only daughter and youngest child of her parents; along with two elder half-brothers John Houston III and Gary Garland, born during her parents' previous marriages to Elsie Hamilton and Fred Garland, she was also preceded by another older brother Michael, born exactly two years apart. Houston's maternal relatives were part of a musically gifted family. Alongside Cissy, Houston's first cousins Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were successful pop and soul singers while operatic soprano Leontyne Price was a distant cousin. Her mother, aunts and two of her uncles formed the gospel group the Drinkard Singers.
Initially living at an apartment at Newark's 8th Street, following her birth, Houston's parents, who officially married in 1964, moved to a middle-class neighborhood in the city called Wainwright Street. As an infant, Houston earned her lifelong nickname "Nippy" from her father; the nickname came from a comic book character Nippy Nibbs, known for getting into mischief. As a fussy baby during winter months, she constantly kicked off her blankets at night. Houston's father would then joked, "Nippy — seldom right".
During her early childhood, Houston's mother spent most of her time in recording studios while her father looked after her and her two elder brothers. In 1967, Houston injured her neck after a clothes hanger she was playing with got caught near her throat after her brother accidentally swung his hands at her direction. Panicked, her father sent her to Beth Israel Hospital in Newark where doctors managed to patch up her wound after finding the hanger had been "within an inch" of severing Houston's vocal cords.
Not long after the incident, the Houston family witnessed the Newark race riots. The singer later recalled eating her dinner on the floor while the city was being engulfed by protesters, police officers and gunfire. The aftermath of the riots left the Houston family in what was quickly becoming an unsafe environment.
That same year, Houston's mother formed the pop-gospel quartet, the Sweet Inspirations. Upon the group making the charts late that year, both Cissy and John, who became the group's manager, were on the road shortly afterwards to bring in much needed income so they could be able to move out of Newark. Before the end of the year, Houston was taken by her mother to Atlantic Studios where she witnessed her mother recording with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke. Houston also witnessed her mother and the Sweet Inspirations performing at venues such as the Philharmonic Hall and the Apollo Theater.
By the time Houston was six, the Sweet Inspirations were regularly performing in Las Vegas with American rock singer Elvis Presley, who was then undergoing a successful comeback to music. However, in September 1969, Cissy Houston left the group to stay more at home with her children and forged on a solo career. In 1970, just as Houston turned seven, the family moved to a two-story Cape Cod-styled home at a suburban East Orange neighborhood called Dodd Street, nicknamed "Doddtown" by its residents and located at the city's First Ward. Their residence's address was 362 Dodd Street.
Houston was described by her mother as an easy-going, inquisitive child. However, her behavior changed somewhat when she entered third grade at her school, Franklin School, and she became the target of bullying by darker skinned black girls due to her long haired braids, plaid skirts and lighter complexion. Houston eventually was forced to fight the bullies by her mother.
Houston began to be much more isolated as she got older. In 1987, the singer told Time magazine: "I finally faced the fact that it isn't a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems. When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I'd be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life."
Said her cousin Dionne in the same article of Houston and the entire family: "You don't get in unless we let you in." Houston said years later that her mother told her, "Whitney, sometimes you have to be your own best friend. Sometimes you're better off just being by yourself."
It was around this time that Houston, who began singing in the children's choir of her mother's church, New Hope Baptist Church, began to take refuge in the church. Raised Baptist, it would be while attending a nearby Pentecostal church that Houston later claimed she "[accepted] the Savior in my life and in my heart... knowing that He was real. It wasn't fake." Cissy Houston later stated, "[Whitney would] never let go of that faith, even through all the turmoil and hard times to come."
By her preteen years, Houston told her mother that she wanted to seriously pursue a career in music; Cissy began to give Houston rigorous training in singing and voice control. In November 1975, at 12 years of age, Houston made her public performance solo debut at New Hope singing the church hymn, "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah".
The performance was received well by the congregation. According to the singer, they were "Holy Ghost fired out" from her performance, which further encouraged Houston to pursue a singing career. A year later, the teenager was transferred to an all-girls Catholic school, Mount Saint Dominic Academy, in nearby Caldwell but felt out of place there due to being one of the very few black students there in the predominantly white school. Houston eventually graduated from the school before turning 18.
Around the same time she attended Mount Saint Dominic Academy, Houston's parents' marriage began falling apart following her father John suffering a near fatal heart attack in September 1976. By the time Houston was 18, they had separated.
Influences and musical development
Houston's biggest vocal and musical influence was her mother, Cissy Houston. As she explained to Rolling Stone in 1993, "My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church. I used to watch her and the feeling . . . my mother always said to me, 'If you don't feel it, then don't mess with it, because it's a waste of time.' When I used to watch my mother sing, which was usually in church, that feeling, that soul, that thing – it's like electricity rolling through you. If you have ever been in a Baptist church or a Pentecostal church, when the Holy Spirit starts to roll and people start to really feel what they’re doing, it's . . . it's incredible. That’s what I wanted."
The singer further added of her mother, "So my mother was my first example that I looked at and said, 'Wow, that voice right there.' And I’m her daughter, so I sound like my mother when my mother was my age, though I truly think my mother has a greater voice than me, because she's the master, I'm the student [laughs]. She has greater range, greater power than I ever did."
Besides her mother, Houston was also heavily influenced by her first cousins Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick. During her adolescence, Houston often accompanied Dionne to her concerts and took cues from Dionne's showmanship and performance style. Some of Houston's more soulful and gritty vocals were influenced by Dee Dee, to which Dionne called "the singer" in their family prior to Houston's birth. Houston also covered several of cousin Dionne's hits in concert, most notably Warwick's rendition of the Burt Bacharach composition, "Alfie".
Another important musical influence outside her immediate family was Aretha Franklin, who was a family friend and with whom Houston affectionately named "Aunt Ree" or "Auntie Ree". Houston first met Franklin at age four when her mother sang backup for during her tenure with the Sweet Inspirations. Houston and Franklin later recorded the 1989 Grammy-nominated duet "It Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be". During her performances later in life, Houston often covered Franklin's hits. In 1994, she recorded a cover of the soul singer's 1976 hit, "Look Into Your Heart", from the soundtrack of the movie, Sparkle in a tribute album dedicated to Curtis Mayfield.