Читать книгу Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Night the Music Died - Cissy Houston - Страница 10

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 father 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 naive 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.

John was still working on getting his divorce, and while he always enjoyed driving the taxi and those big rigs, he also had greater ambitions. About the time we moved in together, he started talking about some big ideas he had for the Drinkards. He believed we were good enough to make it big on the gospel circuit, if we’d just branch out and travel more. If we gave up our day jobs, he said, we could compete with popular gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, the flamboyant Alex Bradford, and Clara Ward.

My sister Lee, who was managing our group, wasn’t buying into John’s big dreams. Like my father, she saw gospel singing as ministry, not as a road to fame and fortune—so although she liked John and knew he loved the Drinkards, she was wary of his ambition. She was also put off by his occasional irreverence, as John wasn’t above laughing at the fake “healings” of holy rollers. Once, Lee even threw him out of a Pentecostal church when he couldn’t stop laughing and making comments in the back pew.

But John felt that with his managerial skills, gift of gab, and knowledge of the gospel circuit, he could successfully manage a singing group. Lee wasn’t about to let him get his hands on the Drinkards, so he had to look elsewhere. As it turned out, my nieces Dionne and Dee Dee—who sang in the New Hope choir and occasionally with the Drinkards—had gotten together with two other girls to form a group called the Gospelaires. John saw his opening, and he began taking the Gospelaires around to churches and gospel shows.

One evening, while he was sitting backstage at the Apollo Theater with the Gospelaires and a few other performers, another musician came in and asked if anyone knew some backup singers he could hire for a recording session. John said, “Sure, I do!”—and just like that, he got the Gospelaires the gig. That was the beginning of Dionne and Dee Dee’s career as backup artists. And that was also how John officially became their manager.

Finally, John was right where he always wanted to be, in the middle of the action. He just loved sitting around joking with the moneymen, producers, and musicians, and his easy manner with executives and artists allowed him to get Dionne and the group some fantastic session work. By the early 1960s, they were working with the legendary producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Henry Glover, and artists such as the Drifters, Dinah Washington, Ben E. King, the Coasters, and Solomon Burke. They made good money, but the real money was in being a solo artist. And that’s what John wanted me to pursue.

“Cissy,” John would tell me, “I can help you do that!” He was always pressing me, reminding me how much money I could be making. He had big ideas about my future in the business, but to his frustration, I just wasn’t interested. I had a good job at RCA, and by then I’d been there for more than ten years, so I had some seniority—something that meant a lot to Depression babies like myself. Also, there was a part of me that was just plain stubborn: I wasn’t going to do something just because John wanted me to do it.

I also remembered how my father had felt about popular music—how he never allowed us to play it in the house. And I’d seen how artists like Dinah Washington, the Staple Singers, and Sam Cooke were booed and called backsliders after they began singing pop music. So, I decided to resist that particular temptation.

Besides, by January 1961, I was pregnant again. Our son, Michael, was born in August at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark—strangely enough, in the same room as Gary. I took a few weeks off from my job at RCA, then put baby Michael with Gary into day care so I could go back to work. With two small boys, a full-time job, and singing with the Drinkards, I just didn’t have time for any other commitments.

But right around that time, John got himself into a jam. He’d promised producer Henry Glover that he’d bring Dionne in to do a session, but she had gotten a call from Scepter Records to do another session for them at the same time. John was stuck, and he begged me to step in. I didn’t want to, but I knew it was important for John to show that he was reliable—so for his sake, I agreed to take Dionne’s place and sing the backup soprano part.

When we arrived at the studios, I could tell Henry Glover wasn’t too happy to see me walking in the door instead of Dionne. John calmed him down long enough to let him hear me sing—and when Henry heard me, he changed his mind fast. That’s how my journey into background work began—a journey that would change not only my life, but the recording industry, too, which would take a whole new approach to background singing.

That session, we were backing up Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly star from Arkansas who was being groomed as the new Elvis. The first day lasted until six in the morning, and we had to come back in for the next three days to finish. By the time we wrapped everything up, I was exhausted, though I had to admit the money was good. Still, I had bad feelings about the job, as I knew my sisters would disapprove.

As members of a younger generation, Dionne and Dee Dee got a pass from our family on singing popular music. But I was a few years older than they were, so my sisters expected me to stick to the old ways—to uphold the tradition of separating sacred and pop music. I was torn, as I wanted to keep singing backup, but I didn’t want to let down the family. And I’d been struggling with this my whole life, ever since my sister Annie and I used to listen to those old Victrola records in secret at home.

After a lot of thought and prayer, I finally took the attitude that I could be in the world of secular music, but not of it. I consoled myself with the thought that I wasn’t trying to be a pop star, or bring attention to myself, or make anyone stray—no, I was just doing a job. And that job didn’t make me any less faithful than anyone else. So I decided to keep on doing background singing, never imagining where it would soon lead me.

As soon as I decided to continue doing background singing, the work came fast and furious. During the first few months after Michael was born, Dionne, Dee Dee, and I worked with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller on an album by the Drifters. From the start, Jerry and Mike were impressed with our rapport, going on about how we “felt each other” and “breathed together.” But you know, it really wasn’t magic—it was just that we’d all been in the New Hope choir, and so we had a lot of experience singing together.

Jerry and Mike knew how to use everything available to them to create a finished recording—how to pull together the lyrics, the arrangement, the instruments, and the voices to create something special. I admired how they used our voices; they raised pop music to another level. So I watched and studied, and tried to learn as much as I could from them. I loved to sing, but on a deeper level, I wanted to understand how songs really worked, and how they could be made better.

We worked on Drifters songs like “On Broadway,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “Please Stay,” rehearsing at Jerry and Mike’s offices in the Brill Building in Manhattan. We were so busy that I had to quit my job at RCA—but the truth was, I earned as much doing two sessions in New York as I did working a whole week at RCA. And I added to those earnings when I joined the union and became the contractor—the person who selects and hires the background singers—for our sessions. Music was now not only my passion, but my profession as well.

One day while we were recording for the Drifters, the great songwriter Burt Bacharach stopped by to listen. His ears perked right up when he heard Dionne, and before leaving he asked if she could sing on some of his projects. She started out just doing demos of his songs for other artists, but she was determined to do more—and her voice was not to be denied. Burt soon agreed to record her as a solo artist.

Dionne signed with Scepter Records in 1962, and her solo recording “Don’t Make Me Over” was released in November of that year. Dee Dee, Sylvia Shemwell, and I sang background on the song, and by December it had climbed into the Top Ten. At age twenty-two, Dionne had her first hit record. And that same month, I discovered I was pregnant once again—with the baby that I so desperately hoped would be a girl.

“Don’t Make Me Over” opened up a steady stream of work for me from Scepter Records. As my pregnancy progressed, the girls and I worked with such artists as Chuck Jackson, Maxine Brown, and the Shirelles. We also worked with great producers like Leiber and Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Bert Berns, and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, which had become the home of soul music. We were busier than ever, and I probably spent at least as much time in the studios as I did at home. John would drive me into Manhattan in the mornings and come back to pick me up when the sessions ended. When we worked for Atlantic, Tom Dowd, who was their genius chief engineer, looked after me during the day—but I think Tom started to get a little nervous during that summer of 1963, when I was overdue and big as a house.

When I first started doing sessions in New York, I had mixed feelings about working with people I didn’t know—particularly white people. Maybe it stemmed from hearing stories about my family’s experiences back in Georgia, or maybe it was because my life had been centered in Newark’s black working-class neighborhoods, and on St. Luke’s with its black congregation. I just didn’t know many white people growing up, so I didn’t really know what to expect.

But doing studio work, I got to know and like a little group of brilliant but kooky soul brothers, Jews, Irishmen, Hispanics, and Italians—and they all became my buddies. We were making music that brought together all of our talents and combined all of our cultural backgrounds. It really was a rich tapestry, and learning to appreciate that was the first step in broadening my somewhat narrow worldview.

Although I was well past my due date, I just kept on singing. And that’s what I was doing right up until that day in August 1963 when Nippy was born.