The woman who first recorded 'Midnight Train to Georgia' watched it become someone else's signature song. The woman who raised Whitney Houston spent decades being introduced as Whitney Houston's mother. Cissy Houston, born Emily Drinkard on September 30, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, lived inside both of those paradoxes for most of her ninety-three years.
She was the youngest of eight children born to Nicholas Drinkard and Delia Mae McCaskill. By age five she was already singing with the Drinkard Singers, the family gospel group that turned professional in 1951 and performed into the early 1960s. Newark shaped her, and Newark is where she died on October 7, 2024, two years before what would have been her ninety-third birthday.
From gospel to the Sweet Inspirations
The Drinkard Singers gave Cissy Houston her foundation, but 1963 changed the trajectory. That year, after giving birth to Whitney, she formed the Sweet Inspirations with Sylvia Shemwell, Estelle Brown, and Myrna Smith. The quartet became one of the most in-demand backing vocal groups of the decade, working behind Otis Redding, The Drifters, Dusty Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, and Van Morrison.
Elvis Presley heard them and brought the Sweet Inspirations to Las Vegas to sing on his stage. The group earned a Grammy nomination. Cissy Houston was no longer just a gospel singer from Newark; she was a pop and R&B voice moving through the center of 1960s American music, though the label on her own records would eventually read RCA Records.
Stepping out as a solo artist
In 1970 she stepped out alone. Her single 'I'll Be There' cracked the top 20 on the R&B chart. 'Think It Over' reached the top 5 on the dance chart. And then there was 'Midnight Train to Georgia' — Cissy Houston recorded the original version, a song that would later become inseparable from Gladys Knight. The industry knew her voice; the public was still learning her name.
Gospel never left her. Cissy Houston won two Grammy Awards in the Traditional Gospel Album category and received a Stellar Award in 1990. She worked as a singer and choir director in church, the same role that had shaped her childhood. Organizations honored her career repeatedly, but the title that stuck was 'The Duchess of Gospel' — a nickname earned over decades, not granted by a single hit.
A family tree of soul and pop
Family surrounded her at every turn. She was aunt to Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick, mother to Gary, Michael, and Whitney, grandmother to Bobbi Kristina Brown. Gary came from her first husband, Gary Garland. Michael and Whitney came from her second husband, John Russell Houston, who also had a son named John from his first wife, Elsie Hamilton. Cissy Houston married twice, and the branches of that family tree became a map of American soul and pop.
The contrast is stark: a woman with two Grammys, a Stellar Award, and a career spanning gospel, soul, disco, and pop, yet the first line of nearly every obituary in 2024 began with Whitney. Cissy Houston outlived her daughter by more than a decade and kept singing, kept directing choirs, kept showing up in Newark. The Duchess of Gospel never stopped working.
So why did she give away 'Midnight Train to Georgia'? Because Cissy Houston understood something about songs — they travel, they change hands, they outgrow their first voice. The five-year-old singing with the Drinkard Singers in Newark became the woman Elvis called to Las Vegas. She was never just Whitney's mother. She was the voice before the voice, and the song before the song.