Cissy Houston Saw Music’s Peaks and Life’s Valleys

If you’re the sort of person who remains locked in a private, perpetual tug of war over whether the greatest singer this country’s ever known is Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston, perhaps you’re also the sort of person who then spares a thought for Whitney’s mother, Cissy. Cissy Houston died at 91 on Monday, and she could sing, too. Let me try that again: Cissy Houston sang, first with the clarity of something just Windexed then, later, with a tone that acquired some protective, matured texture, some bark.

This thought we “who’s the greatest” vacillators spare for Miss Cissy stems from outrageous misfortune: yes, the unimaginable tragedy of losing a daughter the way she lost Whitney and then losing her daughter’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, almost exactly the same way; but also being Whitney’s mother, plus Dionne Warwick’s aunt and a cousin of the opera legend Leontyne Price, in addition to one of Aretha’s homies. How could a member of that bloodline not be in pursuit of music that could garner the sort of acclaim and career they experienced? But Cissy never found it.

Warwick cast her spells with a chardonnay glimmer, singing with low-pulse seduction that had some tooth. Whitney was a fighter jet who could dance Balanchine and Ailey. Miss Cissy had power and range and a knack for put-you-in-your-place phrasing, whether the subject was the Man Upstairs or the man in her bed. But what Cissy lacked was good luck — never had original songs as top-shelf as her niece’s or as humongous as her daughter’s.

After a few years of significant group work with the Sweet Inspirations and an underrated solo album in 1970, she was trying disco (the “Think It Over” album, from 1978) and, the year before, choir-robed R&B on “Cissy Houston,” an album studded with covers that for all its heat and arched eyebrows could easily have been titled “Mavis Staples,” too. But look: Cissy is really feeling the tunes on that LP, reshaping, reliving, husking them. There’s weariness and want, some funk. She sounds like a woman who just walked in the front door after nine hours on her feet, who faintly remembers what being swept off them was like.

Her career began perched at an upper register whose uncanny inheritor is obviously her daughter — the soprano punch-ups and dessert-for-dinner runs. But by 1977, up there, Cissy was often at her ceiling. You can sometimes hear muscle in her climbs, the labor of singing. Some voices can’t wait to get to the skies of a chorus. The alto Miss Cissy embraced seemed to luxuriate in the verses. She always sounded as if the first-floor was as good as the penthouse.