The career of the American singer Cissy Houston, who has died aged 91, exemplified the vital force underlying so much modern popular music: the close relationship between African-American sacred and secular idioms, specifically the influence seeping from Black gospel music, with its deep emotional roots and eruptions of ecstatic fervour, into the fabric of R&B, soul and pop.
Houston spent 30 years as the “minister of music” at the New Hope Baptist Church in her native Newark, New Jersey. But she also sang, often with her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, on many of the great pop hits of the 1960s and 70s, from the Drifters’ On Broadway through Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman, Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man and Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion to David Bowie’s Young Americans.
