Whitney Houston’s body was flown to New Jersey last night in preparation for a Saturday funeral in Newark—the city in which she was born and raised. The private service will be held at New Hope Baptist Church—the place where she first started singing at age 11.
Houston, 48, was found dead Saturday in the Beverly Hilton. No official cause of death has been given: It’ll be weeks before toxicology reports will be released, though speculation has, perhaps inevitably, gravitated toward Houston’s history of substance abuse as a contributing factor.
I can’t say that I was ever a “fan” of Whitney Houston. I never owned an album of hers, never downloaded one of her songs. I, like most of the free world, heard “I Will Always Love You” about 16 gazillion times when it spent 14 weeks on top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1992-93. And I might’ve told friends at the time that I was sick of it.
If so, I lied.
Her voice required attention. It demanded it. While I personally might gravitate toward the vocal stylings of an Ella Fitzgerald or a Stevie Nicks or an Amy Winehouse, Whitney owned the best set of pipes I ever heard.
I was in high school when Houston hit it big, and it’s interesting to see how she, in some ways, altered the course of music. In the early 1980s, the top female artists were folks like Joan Jett and Deborah Harry (Blondie), Cyndi Lauper and Madonna—all fine artists, but none were blessed with an otherworldly instrument. And in an age when musicians were messing around with new sounds from the synthesizer, even many singers who had incredible voices were tied into the formula of 1980s pop punk.
Houston’s “You Give Good Love” was a departure: not new, exactly, but refreshingly old-fashioned … a relatively unadorned torch song wrapped in a voice that was so gentle and so powerful that it seemed capable of giving you a smooch and pushing you—by its sheer ooomph—down the stairs. But it was only after I heard her do a startling medley of songs, including one from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, at the 1994 American Music Awards that I really decided she possessed the voice of the age.
Houston was one-of-a-kind, but that didn’t stop a legion of singers from trying to duplicate her. Writes Randall Roberts of The Los Angeles Times:
She knew she had a voice and that it mattered. And with this knowledge and confidence in her gift, she inspired generations of belting singers who followed. She created not only a movement but a template, one that powered female-led R&B into the center of pop music marketplace, where it exists within not only the music of Beyoncé and Rihanna but also in how contestants on singing shows such as The Voice and American Idol try to impress the judges.
We may question some of her lifestyle choices, and maybe even some of her songs. But I’d like to think that she never completely lost sight of where her voice came from. And maybe it’s telling that in her last “performance,” during a party the Thursday before she died, she sang—her voice torn and tattered from years of use and abuse—”Jesus Loves Me.”
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