Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston: The Voice That Set the Standard

On April 23, 1988, "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and made Whitney Houston the only artist in history with seven consecutive chart-toppers, breaking a record previously shared by the Beatles and the Bee Gees. She was twenty-four. Five years earlier she had been a teenage model singing show tunes on daytime television. What happened in between was not luck.

Newark Blood

She was born on August 9, 1963, at Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, to Emily "Cissy" Houston, a Grammy-winning gospel and soul singer, and John Russell Houston Jr., an Army veteran who later worked as a Newark administrator. Her father nicknamed her "Nippy." The family tree reads like a map of twentieth-century American vocal music: Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick were cousins, as was the opera soprano Leontyne Price; Darlene Love was her godmother and Aretha Franklin an honorary aunt. Further back, her great-great-grandfather Jeremiah Burke Sanderson was an abolitionist.

Houston joined the New Hope Baptist Church choir at five and learned piano there. In November 1975, aged twelve, she sang her first solo, "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah." Cissy trained her throughout her teens. Her stated influences beyond her mother and the Warwicks were Karen Carpenter, Franklin, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight and Roberta Flack, a list that explains the hybrid she became: a gospel instrument governed by pop restraint. She attended Franklin Elementary, then transferred at thirteen to Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a Catholic girls' high school in Caldwell, graduating in 1981. Spotted at Carnegie Hall, she signed with Wilhelmina Models and became one of the first Black women on the cover of Seventeen.

The Arista Years

Clive Davis signed her to Arista on April 10, 1983, when she was nineteen, and introduced her nationally that June on The Merv Griffin Show, where she sang "Home" from The Wiz. Her first hit, a May 1984 duet with Teddy Pendergrass called "Hold Me," reached the top ten of the R&B and adult contemporary charts. Then came the album.

Whitney Houston, released February 14, 1985, entered the Billboard 200 at a humiliating number 166 and climbed for a year, reaching the top ten after twenty-three weeks and number one in March 1986, where it stayed fourteen weeks, the longest run of any female debut. "Saving All My Love for You," "How Will I Know" and "Greatest Love of All" went to number one consecutively. It remains the best-selling debut album by a solo artist, with more than 25 million copies sold worldwide. Rolling Stone called her "one of the most exciting new voices in years." The New York Times, more coolly, described the record as "an impressive, musically conservative showcase for an exceptional vocal talent." Both judgments were correct.

Whitney, released in June 1987, made her the first woman to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 and the first artist ever to enter at number one in the United States and Britain simultaneously. "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" topped the charts in seventeen countries. In December 1986 she had become the first Black female artist in regular MTV rotation, at a moment when the channel was under sustained attack for excluding artists of color.

Anthem and Apex

Her performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Super Bowl XXV on January 27, 1991, two weeks into the Persian Gulf War, remains the benchmark against which every subsequent anthem is measured. That the vocal was pre-recorded, standard procedure for such events, drew criticism; it changed nothing. Released commercially, it reached the US top twenty, the biggest chart hit any anthem performance has produced, and she gave the proceeds to the Red Cross Gulf Crisis Fund. Re-released after the September 11 attacks, it reached number six.

Then The Bodyguard. The 1992 film with Kevin Costner took more than $410 million worldwide. The soundtrack, which Houston executive-produced and on which she recorded six tracks, spent twenty weeks at number one, became the first album ever to sell a million copies in a single week under Nielsen SoundScan, and has sold more than 45 million copies: the best-selling album by a female artist and the best-selling soundtrack in history. "I Will Always Love You," Dolly Parton's song rebuilt, held number one for fourteen weeks and sold 24 million copies worldwide, the best-selling single ever by a female solo artist. At the 1994 Grammys she took Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Pop Female Vocal Performance, becoming the first Black woman to win Album of the Year as both producer and artist.

The Other Career

The Houston most often forgotten is the executive. She took creative control as executive producer on I'm Your Baby Tonight in 1990. She advised Babyface to build the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack as an "album of women with vocal distinction"; it went seven-times platinum and drew eleven Grammy nominations. In 1996 she founded BrownHouse Productions with Debra Martin Chase to "show aspects of the lives of African-Americans that have not been brought to the screen before." Their first feature, The Princess Diaries (2001), grossed more than $165 million and made Houston and Chase the first Black producers of a $100 million film. The Preacher's Wife soundtrack, also 1996, became the best-selling gospel album of all time. In August 2001 she signed a $100 million contract with Arista/BMG.

The Unravelling

From 2000 the machine faltered. She failed to appear to induct Clive Davis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; weeks later Burt Bacharach fired her from the Academy Awards, her publicist citing throat trouble. The author Steve Pond later wrote that "Houston's voice was shaky, she seemed distracted and jittery, and her attitude was casual, almost defiant." Robyn Crawford, her longtime assistant and closest friend, resigned. Her marriage to Bobby Brown and her cocaine use became the public story, eclipsing Just Whitney (2002) and One Wish (2003). I Look to You (2009) debuted at number one with 305,000 copies, a genuine return, though the tour that followed drew mixed notices. On February 9, 2012, she sang "Jesus Loves Me" with Kelly Price at a Hollywood nightclub. Two days later she drowned in a bath at the Beverly Hilton; heart disease and cocaine use were contributing factors. She was forty-eight. The Grammys were held that night.

Why Whitney Is Called a Genius

The word is one the documentary record around Houston largely avoids, and honesty requires saying so. Rolling Stone in 1985 called her "one of the most exciting new voices in years"; the same magazine in 2023 ranked her the second greatest singer of all time. That is the language of supremacy, not of intellect, and the distinction matters.

The genius, if the term applies, is interpretive. Houston did not write her songs. What she did is harder to teach: she imported the full emotional apparatus of Black gospel, the melisma, the delayed release, the ascent held one beat past comfort, into three-minute pop structures without letting it collapse into display. "I Will Always Love You" is a country song by Dolly Parton. Houston's reading, entering unaccompanied and building across four minutes to a climax she then declines to oversell, sold 24 million copies. The architecture of that restraint is the achievement. On technique the counter-case is weak; on authorship it is strong. Clive Davis chose much of her early material, and her debut really was, as the Times said, conservative.

There is a second and less romantic case. Houston was a formidable operator: executive producer, negotiator of one of the largest contracts in music history, film producer, the first Black woman to win Album of the Year as a producer, co-founder of a company with an explicit political brief. If genius means seeing an opening nobody else has framed, the gospel album and BrownHouse Productions qualify at least as cleanly as any high note.

Legacy

She sold more than 220 million records. She holds eleven Billboard Hot 100 number ones and remains the only artist with seven in a row; she was the first Black artist with three Diamond-certified albums; the RIAA named her the top-selling R&B female artist of the century. She is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame and, twice, the Grammy Hall of Fame. "If you're gonna have a long career, there's a certain way to do it and I did it that way," she said in 1990. "I'm not ashamed of it." The career was not long. The standard has outlasted it.