She sang, often with her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, on many of the great pop hits of the 1960s and 1970s, including Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl
, who has died aged 91, exemplified the vital force underlying so much modern popular music: the close relationship between African-American sacred and secular idioms, specifically the influence seeping from black gospel music, with its deep emotional roots and eruptions of ecstatic fervour, into the fabric of R&B, soul and pop.
She also became known as the mother of the singer Whitney Houston, whose enormous worldwide success, following her appearance in the 1992 film The Bodyguard, attracted attention to a private life that included a turbulent marriage to the singer Bobby Brown and problems with drug addiction. Virtually from infancy Cissy and her brothers and sisters had been encouraged by their parents to sing in church. They formed a vocal group, into which Cissy was enrolled when she was five. “I used to get so mad,” she told Rolling Stone magazine in 1978. “We’d be out playing in the sun with the other kids and my older sister, Marie, would make us come in for rehearsal.”
By the time the second marriage brought her a change of surname, she was working regularly as a backing singer on pop recording sessions, in demand for her three-octave range. With the two Warrick sisters and a friend, Doris Troy, she formed a unit that was soon busy in New York studios providing backing vocals on hits by Solomon Burke, Chuck Jackson and many others.
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