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Sissy Houston, the gospel singer and backup vocalist who guided her daughter Whitney Houston to stardom

died Monday at the age of 91. Sissy Houston began singing on the Gospel circuit as a

child. She also sang secular music. She performed with the sweet

inspirations, the group that backed Aretha Franklin, and she sang backup vocals

for Elvis Presley, Solomon Burke, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, Van Morrison, The Drifters, and

Dionne Warwick, who was her niece.

In a New York Times obituary, Robert Darden, who wrote several books on gospel music said of Houston she was a

significant figure not because she sold a lot of records but because of the people

she influenced who did sell a lot and because of her work as a

sustainer and nurturer of the gospel music tradition. For more than 50 years

Sissy Houston was the choir director for the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark where she got her start as a singer.

She endured the double tragedy of the death of her daughter Whitney who drowned in a hotel bathtub in 2012,

and three years later the loss of her granddaughter

and Whitney's daughter Bobby Christina Brown who was found unresponsive in her

home bathtub and died shortly after. Cherry spoke with Sissy Houston in 1998.

At the time Houston had written her autobiography,

How Sweet the Sound, My Life With God and Gospel.

They began with music from Sissy Houston's Grammy my life with God and Gospel.

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