Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

by Houston, Cissy

  I ran out of the house without even knowing where I was going. Somehow, I ended up on Charlton Street, and as I wandered past St. Luke’s, something made me turn around and go back. It was a weekday, and I could see through the door that the evening service had started. I went in and sat down in a back pew, and though I could see Reverend Odum preaching up in the pulpit, I didn’t hear a word he was saying as my mind drifted to all my problems. As I sat there feeling sorry for myself, the tears just welled up in my eyes.

  I began sobbing—crying for the mother I’d lost and still missed, for being separated from Larry and Nicky, and for having to leave our home to go live with a woman that I disliked. Why did life have to be filled with so much hardship? How were we supposed to deal with all the cruelties life bestowed on us? It just seemed so hard, so unfair.

  But once again, out of the ashes of something terrible, something wonderful emerged. As I sat weeping in the pew, I finally heard Reverend Odum’s voice. He was addressing the congregation, but it was as if he were talking directly to me.

  “Count your blessings,” his voice rang out. I looked up, wiping my eyes.

  “Yes sir! Count your blessings, young man, young woman, mother, dad. Where would you be right now if not for God? Did you wake up this morning?” the reverend shouted.

  “Yes!” the congregation answered.

  “Did He put the breath of life into your lungs this morning?”

  “Amen,” someone yelled.

  “Then give Him praise!” the reverend shouted. “Is He worthy to be praised? Then give Him praise!”

  Then, over his voice, the piano rang out and the choir began singing:

  Count your blessings,

  Name them one by one.

  Count your many blessings,

  See what God has done.

  I had heard the song before, but I’d never really paid attention to the words. Suddenly, they took on new meaning. I was only fourteen, but my life flashed before me as I sat in that pew. I looked back and instead of seeing misfortune, I saw how lucky, how blessed I was. I saw how things could have gone horribly wrong, and how fortunate I was to have had a mother who loved me, and brothers and sisters, and a father who protected and sheltered me.

  And I suddenly saw Him in all of them—how He loved me through each of them. Silently, I began to praise Him and give Him glory. I raised my arms, and deep inside, I felt a warmth, a glow, building, swelling . . . it was as if I was being transported, lifted to another level, another world. I opened my mouth and felt myself speaking, then singing and laughing for joy. It was the most joyous feeling—I could feel the Spirit coursing through my body, and I surrendered to it. I gave myself to Him.

  The Spirit hit me like lightning, and it was something I had never felt before; I cried out in the name of Jesus and the Holy Ghost, and they heard me. That night, they used me like never before. It was the most glorious feeling I had ever experienced.

  Walking home after the service, I knew my life had changed forever. I saw the hand of the Creator in everything around me, and it was like seeing the world for the first time. God was real, I knew it, and I wanted to serve Him. I wanted to sing for Him. That evening, I realized that I’d been serving God all along; I just didn’t know what I was doing. But now, it all seemed clear. I no longer questioned His Word, His deeds—I just believed.

  I began to see and share my father’s vision of the purpose of singing. Singing gospel was a ministry, an end in itself; you didn’t have to get famous or make a lot of money. I came to see that, in singing, you convince others of the reality of God and inspire the Word in others. And every song you sing also strengthens your own faith.

  I also came to understand that our family’s singing together is what ultimately helped us survive. It helped keep us together, even through the hardest times. We sang together and stayed together—we held each other up. I’d always had family, but from that night at St. Luke’s onward, I had faith, too—a faith that would carry me through some of my darkest days to come.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Gospel Truth

  I had been singing in the church since age five, but after that night at St. Luke’s, music and faith became the absolute center of my life. I was committed to singing and spreading the Word, and at the same time, the Drinkard Quartet—which we renamed the Drinkard Singers—kept on performing, getting bigger and more popular.

  Ronnie Williams, one of the area’s biggest gospel promoters, was booking us in shows all over New York and New Jersey, and all down the eastern seaboard. We mostly sang at small churches, but we were also booked into concerts with some of the biggest quartets of the day—acts like the Davis Sisters, with their featured singer Jackie Verdell; the Swan Silvertones; and the Dixie Hummingbirds, with their fabulous lead singer Claude Jeter.

  And during the early 1950s, while traveling on the circuit with the Soul Stirrers, I met their lead singer, Sam Cooke. Sam was not only a great singer but also a very good-looking man. We dated for a quick minute back then, and I almost wound up married to him. But Sam lived in too fast a world for me. I knew that neither my Daddy nor my sisters would approve of our relationship, or of Sam’s forays away from gospel and into the world of pop music. Many people—like my sisters—didn’t like seeing their gospel stars move into the world of secular music, as they considered it a form of backsliding from the church. And I was young enough then that I still worried what other people thought about stuff like that.

  My sister Lee was managing us now, and like my father, she was determined to keep the Drinkards on the straight and narrow, far from the temptations of popular entertainment. So when New York City DJ Joe Bostic, known as the “Dean of Gospel Disc Jockeys,” approached her about recording deals, management contracts, expanded road tours, radio, and TV shoots, she shot him down quick.

  At the time, gospel music was becoming more commercial, and at certain gospel extravaganzas, or during engagements at places like the Apollo Theater in Harlem, we’d seen how some groups succumbed to the temptations that came with fame and money. Backstage, some so-called church folk and gospel artists were every bit as sinful as the world they were supposed to be saving. Lee didn’t want us anywhere near that.

  But a little later on, Bostic made an offer Lee couldn’t refuse. He had plans to feature Mahalia Jackson in a show at Carnegie Hall—and he wanted us on the program, too. Lee quickly agreed, so in October 1951, the Drinkards appeared on that famed Fifty-Seventh Street stage with Mahalia and other gospels greats such as Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward. This was the biggest venue we’d ever performed in, and that show nearly tore the house down—literally. At one point, Mahalia had to warn the crowd that if they didn’t cool it, the police were going to empty the hall and put us all out in the street.

  This was a magical evening, but even a Carnegie Hall appearance wasn’t allowed to affect our regular routine. There was a big party afterward, but do you think Daddy let us go? No, all of us Drinkards dutifully piled into a cab, went to the Port Authority, and took a bus back to New Jersey—right back to focusing on church, our day jobs, and rehearsals.

  My father didn’t come to see us perform that night, and some people wondered why. But you know, I didn’t really expect him to get all excited about Carnegie Hall. To Daddy, gospel was never about fortune or fame or the greatest venue in New York City. It was about ministry and teaching the Word—these were the only things that mattered to him.

  And that’s why Daddy soon began urging me to take over directing the St. Luke’s choir. He believed that teaching, and helping others to express their gift, was a crucial part of gospel music. That’s what he’d done for his children, and I guess he wanted to pass along that vision to me. I was reluctant—directing a choir was a lot of work, and I just wanted to sing. But once I started, I soon found teaching others almost as rewarding as singing.

  I taught the choir just as Reebie and my fathe
r had taught us—with a firm hand and a focus on what really mattered. And like them, I didn’t take no mess. This was the same way I would teach Nippy years later, when she told me she wanted to be a singer—no messing around, no shirking. It might have seemed hard-edged or strict, as I wasn’t one to sugarcoat anything. But that was the way I had learned, so it was the only way I knew how to do it.

  Our family had already been through so much together—the fire, losing my brother William to the streets, my mother’s strokes and her death, and my father’s remarriage. But through it all, we had stayed close and looked out for each other. We were all adults now, living our own lives and working day jobs while singing with the Drinkards. Once again, life was good—but if I knew anything by now, it was that you never know what’s around the corner.

  In the spring of 1952, when I was eighteen, my father went into the hospital because of stomach pains. Exploratory surgery revealed that he had stomach cancer, and it was already so advanced that even though he’d only just been diagnosed, it was too late to do anything. Within a week, Daddy was dead.

  Perhaps because I was older and closer to him, and was able to understand more clearly what had happened, I was even more devastated by my father’s death than my mother’s. I walked around in a daze. I just couldn’t believe that my father, the man who had always been there for us, who had served as a model and a protector through good times and bad, was gone. Just like that, I had no parents—and I was barely out of high school.

  Life after Daddy’s death was a blur. I was lonely and restless, and I didn’t have any kind of ambition left in me. What was the point, when everything could just be taken away from you in the blink of an eye? Without my father’s steadying hand, and mired in sadness at his death, I started to slide from the safe and disciplined path he’d always kept us on.

  I started drinking, and for a few years, I partied pretty heavily with my brothers and my sister Annie. I did still make it to church every Sunday morning, and I never missed a choir rehearsal, but things were changing at St. Luke’s, too, which only added to my feelings of being unmoored.

  We had always loved St. Luke’s, especially its regular pastor, the Reverend Warrick, who had started coming to our house for dinner back when my mother was still alive. My parents loved Reverend Warrick and his wife, and we were all thrilled when the reverend’s son, Mancel, got together with my sister Lee. (They married and had three children—my nieces Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick, who both later became recording artists, and my nephew Mancel Jr.) Our families were very close, and Reverend Warrick was a big part of the reason we loved St. Luke’s. So, when he left the church not long after my father died, we all began drawing away from it, too. We just didn’t feel as comfortable there anymore.

  Losing St. Luke’s on top of everything could have been the final straw, plunging me even further into drinking and despair. But just when we needed it, our family found another church. The Drinkards had sung a few times at New Hope Baptist Church, and we all liked it. So we decided to switch to New Hope, and soon I took over directing their choir there. New Hope would become my spiritual home, the place where I would worship for the rest of my life—and the church where Nippy would first learn to sing. Years later, it would also be the place where we brought her home, to lay her to rest.

  But all that was far in the future. For the moment, New Hope was the place that drew me back from partying and straying, the place where I once again found strength in my faith and managed to put myself right. My parents were gone, and it was time for me to grow up, time to move on to the next part of my life—even though, as I’d find soon enough, I was still so naïve I didn’t know my rear end from my elbow.

  I started the next phase of my life with a big misstep, by marrying a man named Freddy Garland. A good-looking construction worker, Freddy had proposed after a couple of months of dating, and I said yes. I suppose I agreed because I was lonely—my sisters and brothers were all starting families by then, and I was the only one who wasn’t married. Freddy and I married at New Hope in 1955, but within a few months I knew I’d made a mistake. He was a good man, but I didn’t love him, so I left him after two years of marriage—even though I was pregnant.

  I moved in with my sister Lee to save money, and kept working at a job I’d had for several years, making electronics at the RCA plant in Elizabeth. And a few months after leaving Freddy, I gave birth to my first child—a five-pound, six-ounce baby boy, Gary Garland. I was a twenty-five-year-old single mother, and I had no idea what would happen next.

  That summer, the Drinkards got the call that would end up changing my life. Ronnie Williams called with our biggest offer yet—to sing with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward at the Newport Jazz Festival.

  The Drinkards had cut back on performing since Daddy had died, so Ronnie’s call came out of the blue. We were a little out of practice, and I was pregnant and showing, but somehow the Spirit was moving us that day. The crowd was huge, and they felt it, too—people rushed toward the stage, nearly mobbing us as we sang. It was a performance I’ll never forget, and later I thought how much I wished Daddy could have seen it—all those people being moved by music, by the Spirit, just as he always hoped.

  Our performance that day at Newport led to a resurgence for the Drinkard Singers. Representatives from the RCA-Victor label offered us a contract, and we became the first gospel group to ever sign with that label. We released our first album, Make a Joyful Noise, in 1958, and after Joe Bostic began playing one of the cuts on his radio show, people started taking notice. Elvis Presley heard it and must have liked it, because he tried to convince us to record or tour with him—but of course Lee wouldn’t hear of it. With all of his famous hip-shaking and provocations, she wasn’t letting us anywhere near “Elvis the Pelvis.” Though we missed that chance to meet Elvis, another, much more important meeting was about to take place.

  The success of Make a Joyful Noise led to an invitation for the Drinkards to perform on a gospel show broadcast every week from Newark’s Symphony Hall. And that’s what we were doing one Sunday morning when a tall, good-looking man was sitting in front of his TV at home, watching the show. The camera happened to zoom in on me for a close-up, and the man apparently liked what he saw. He knew a

  few musicians around town, so he asked one of them to

  introduce us.

  And that was how I met John Houston.

  When John showed up on the set of our Symphony Hall gospel show one morning in the spring of 1958, I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. I just knew that he was gorgeous—and that he was staring at me.

  Later, it dawned on me that I’d first seen John about a decade earlier. He was an army MP then, and he’d come to the apartment building next to ours looking for someone who’d gone AWOL. I didn’t speak to him, and he didn’t notice me. But my friends and I all thought he was one of the most handsome men we’d ever seen. I was only fourteen, of course, and it may have been partially because of the uniform, but John made an impression the moment I saw him.

  Ten years later, at Symphony Hall, I was even more impressed. John had light skin and fine features (his dad was part Native American), but what really struck me was how he carried himself—tall and well built, the man just exuded charisma. I was nervous as a schoolgirl when he walked over, but as we talked, he turned out to be not only smart and sophisticated but drop-dead funny, too. Even though he’d gone to the Seton Hall prep school in Orange, New Jersey, John was down-to-earth and real.

  I loved the way he’d laugh and joke with me—and oh, how that man could talk! I could have listened to him all day. I’m not sure I believe in love at first sight, but if there is such a thing, it happened that day for me.

  I was twenty-four when we met, and John was thirteen years older. The age difference didn’t matter to me, but my sisters Lee and Reebie didn’t like it. They thought he was robbing the cradle. And they were disgusted with me when they found
out that, although separated, John was still married. By now, though, I had developed one very useful trait that has stayed with me my whole life: I never worried about what other people thought—even my own sisters. I liked John, and he liked me, so that was that.

  John and I started going out, and pretty soon—well, we did wrong. We began living together, moving into an apartment on Eighth Street in Newark. I knew what we were doing was wrong as long as John was still married, but we were just so much in love. He loved kids, and was so good with my son, Gary. And when I met his family, we hit it off, too. It may have been wrong, but it sure did feel right.

  I was still working at RCA, singing with the Drinkards, and picking up a few dollars directing the choirs at New Hope and another small church. John was driving a taxi at night, and he sometimes drove those big rigs that hauled food and goods cross-country. We struggled to make ends meet while John looked for better work, but in those early years we were really happy. We’d laugh and cut up together like a couple of teenagers. And we were truly in love. Later on, I used to like to sing a song called “I Miss the Hungry Years,” and you know, sometimes I still do. They really were good ones.

  Right from the start, John and Gary and I were a family, and soon we met a neighbor who would also become like family—the woman who would become my best friend. Ellen White was a single mother with four children when she moved in across the hall from us. John invited her over for coffee one day, and we started spending all kinds of time together. Though her given name was Ellen, I took to calling her Bae—short for “Baby.” I wasn’t close to too many people, but Bae and I got to be like sisters, and Nippy and my sons would come to know her as “Aunt Bae.” From those humble beginnings a lifelong friendship was born, and Bae would eventually see us through the highest and lowest points of our lives.