Gospel great Cissy Houston has died at 91: NPR

Singer Cissy Houston performs on stage during the 2012 BET Awards in Los Angeles, California.

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Michael Buckner/Getty Images for BET

Singer Cissy Houston performs on stage during the 2012 BET Awards in Los Angeles, California.

Michael Buckner/Getty Images for BET

Cissy Houston, a singer whose career began in childhood and spanned generations and genres from gospel to pop, has died. As a child, Houston performed with her siblings and later sang backing vocals with Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison and others. She was also a renowned solo gospel artist and mother of one of the world's biggest pop and R&B stars, Whitney Houston. That was her 91 years old.

Houston was born Emily Drinkard in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, into a musically talented family. As a child, she was expected to perform at local churches with her brothers and sisters.

“I was 5 years old and they had to sit me in a chair to see me,” she told WHYY's Fresh air in 1998. “Of course, when I was 5 years old, I wanted to be outside and play with everyone else, and that was difficult for me. No question. I had no choice.”

Their family group, The Drinkard Singers, was one of the first groups to release a gospel album on a major record label. A joyful noise was released in 1959 by RCA Records.

In the 1960s, Houston decided to sing secular music and formed the group The Sweet Inspirations. Under Houston's leadership, they gained a reputation as one of the best backing groups in the business, performing on hundreds of songs and helping to shape classics from Van Morrison's “Brown Eyed Girl” to Dusty Springfield's “Son of a Preacher Man.”

The group's first album, the self-titled The sweet inspirations recorded in 1967, peaked at number 12 billboardThe band's hot soul albums and their crossover hit single “Sweet Inspiration” reached the top 20 on the Hot 100 singles chart.

Along with Sylvia Shemwell, Myrna Smith and Estelle Brown, Houston sang backup for Jimi Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, The Drifters, Wilson Pickett and Houston's niece Dionne Warwick, who was once part of the group along with her sister Dee Dee Warwick before they became one a solo artist.

Houston, an innovative musician, used four background voices instead of the standard three and doubled her upper part to enrich the sound. She explained her process Fresh air Using the example of the song “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” by Aretha Franklin.

“'Natural Woman' was like…trying to improve on what she did. That’s the core of the background work,” Houston said. “A lot of times backgrounds make songs and really sell them.”

Still, after spending a lot of time in the background, Houston was ready for the spotlight. “I was in the process of becoming an independent artist and then I left The Sweet Inspirations and became a singles artist,” Houston said.

She was also torn between professional demands and motherhood. Long work hours and traveling across the country kept her from seeing her children as often as she would have liked. She had two sons, Gary Garland and Michael, and a daughter, Whitney, who would later become one of the biggest pop stars of all time.

Cissy and Whitney Houston were famously close. Their relationship was also that of mentor and protégé.

“She is my mother. She is my friend. “She’s my teacher,” Whitney Houston continued Entertainment tonight in 1987. “It’s like a little gas station. If you need some strength, you just go to mom and she will fill you up.”

Whitney died when she was just 48, after years of battling addiction and a notoriously difficult marriage. In 2013, Cissy Houston wrote a book: Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped. The memoir upset her granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, who also later died tragically at the age of 22. In a now-deleted tweet, Brown expressed her anger. “I find that my mother and I, as her daughter, will not tolerate me being disrespectful,” she wrote.

The memoir's handling of rumors about Whitney Houston's secret lesbian relationship also led to a memorable moment with Oprah Winfrey.

“Would it bother you if your daughter Whitney was gay?” Winfrey asked Cissy Houston in a 2013 interview on OWN's Next chapter.

“Absolutely,” Houston replied.

“You wouldn’t have liked that at all?” Oprah pressed.

“Not at all,” Houston said.

Houston stayed true to her roots in other ways, too. For more than 50 years, through triumphs and tragedies, Cissy Houston led the Youth Inspiration Choir at her hometown Baptist Church in Newark.