So, that’s how it all began, with Aretha. Singing background for her felt special, because we had a real rapport together; I could feel what she was trying to do, and I riffed off that. All the songs we recorded during those early sessions, including “Chain of Fools,” “I Never Loved a Man,” and “Since You Been Gone,” ended up being big sellers.
But my favorites were “Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way,” which had one of the best background lines I ever sang. At first, we were stumped for ideas on “Ain’t No Way,” and then John suggested that I thread in a high solo part behind Ree’s lead. I thought he was crazy, but we tried it, and those lilting high notes provided the perfect contrast to the melancholy in her voice. Later, during a performance at Lincoln Center in New York City, the audience gave Ree and me a long standing ovation after we sang that song. It became one of my signature performances with her.
Great things started happening for the Sweets. We released our first single, the Pops Staples tune “Why Am I Treated So Bad,” and we also recorded with Van Morrison, doing the backup for one of my favorite songs, “Brown-Eyed Girl.” And although I didn’t want to go away and leave my children, the Sweets and I agreed to go on tour with Aretha, both opening for her and backing her. As an incentive, Atlantic promised to let us cut our own gospel album after the tour. So we went into the studio later that year to record our first gospel set, Songs of Faith & Inspiration.
But one of the best things that happened in 1967 came after an appearance we made at the Apollo Theater.
We were singing background for Tommy Hunt, whose song “Human” had been a big hit, and sitting up in the balcony was a sixteen-year-old boy playing hooky from school. A legendary place in the music world, the Apollo used to have five or six shows a day, particularly on Wednesdays when the amateur show would take place. Each of their shows had about five or six acts or artists, who would play three or four songs apiece until the headliner would do a whole forty-minute set. This teenage boy playing hooky happened to arrive at the Apollo just in time to see the Sweets come out onstage in our flowing yellow chiffon gowns. When he heard us sing, he decided he had to somehow get backstage to talk with us.
And that’s how we met Luther Vandross. He walked right up to me backstage and said, “You all are the best singers I’ve ever heard!” I was sucking on a piece of candy to soothe my throat, so I took it out and said, “Thank you, baby.” That moment marked the beginning of a beautiful, close friendship. Luther was just a high school kid then, but he would end up working with Nippy and me as a backup singer when Nippy was a teenager. Later, after he became a star himself, Luther always insisted that the Sweet Inspirations sing background for him whenever we were available.
That was the thing about the Sweet Inspirations—we were known throughout the industry for great work. Everybody was trying to make a hit record, and a lot of times, the background was what put a record over the top and made it a hit. We always tried to make the background memorable, to make it something that people would sing along to when they heard the song. And we were professionals: We always got to a session on time, and we finished in the allotted time. We were the baddest four girls in town, out of town, all over town!
So, 1967 was a great year in many ways—but it brought some frightening times, too.
One night, while I was in Las Vegas on tour with Aretha, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I could just feel that something was wrong back home. It was very late in Newark, but I called anyway. John answered the phone, and right away I said, “What’s wrong with my baby?” Meaning Nippy, who was then four years old.
“Nothing’s wrong,” John said. But I could tell by his voice he was lying.
“You better put her on the phone right now,” I told him. I wasn’t messing around.
I could hear his muffled voice saying something to her, and then she got on the phone. “Hi, Mommy,” she said, her voice quiet and raspy and her diction funny. Something was very wrong—the child could hardly talk!
“Nippy!” I said. “What is wrong with you? What happened?”
“Nothing, Mommy,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“Put your daddy back on the phone, baby,” I said, trying to control my temper. If I was going to yell at anyone, it wasn’t her. It was my husband, for letting who-knows-what happen to my little girl while I was two thousand miles away.
When John got on the phone, I snapped, “You better tell me right now what the hell happened to Nippy!”
He sighed. “She’s all right, Cissy. She just fell down, you know? She’s fine.” But when he told me the details, I wanted to kill him. It seems that Nippy had been playing with Michael, running around the house and acting silly like they usually did. But for some reason, she’d stuck a wire coat hanger in her mouth. When her father yelled, “Stop that running!” she did—but she fell down and the hook of that hanger rammed right back toward her throat.
She screamed and yanked it out, and blood just started gushing out of her mouth. She ran to her daddy, and when John looked into her mouth he saw a nasty gash far back in her throat.
John drove her to the emergency room at nearby Beth Israel Hospital, and the doctors told him she was lucky—the hook had just missed piercing her vocal cords. He held Nippy while they stitched up her wound and filled her mouth with surgical packing, and they’d just gotten home from the emergency room when I had that bad feeling and called home.
John apologized for not being more careful, but even though I knew there wasn’t much he could do to slow those kids down, I couldn’t help myself—I was so mad, and being that far away from my baby, I felt helpless. I couldn’t just leave the Sweets and come home, but for the rest of that tour with Aretha, I called home even more often than I had before. When I finally got back, Nippy’s stitches were out and she sounded normal again. I remember thanking God and thinking that Nippy’s escape from more serious injury had been a miracle.
And 1967 brought frightening times not just to our family, but to the entire city of Newark, too. Drugs were spreading everywhere, even creeping into our cozy little village on Wainwright. The city was tense from the rise in crime and frustration with a civil rights movement that was moving a little too slowly and deliberately. In July, that tension exploded in seven days of violent rioting and looting that made national news.
Our home wasn’t in the center of it, but we were close enough to smell the smoke, see the flames soaring above the Central Ward, and hear the pop-pop-pop of gunshots. At night we could hear footsteps of people running along the cobblestone streets, and the sound of gunfire. Our neighborhood no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children.
After the riots, John and I started thinking about leaving Newark, but we knew that buying a new home would cost money that we just didn’t have. I was stuck in a frustrating cycle—I was the family’s main breadwinner, so despite wanting to spend more time with my children, I had to stay on the road. Atlantic kept recording the Sweets and trying to promote us, but they really wanted us to tour to promote the music. Our family needed the money, so I kept on working and touring. But I really wasn’t happy about it.
And the touring itself had its ups and downs, too. For our road trips, Atlantic supplied us with a car because I didn’t like riding on the bus with the rest of the crew—I never could stand the smell of marijuana and didn’t want to be around it. Sometimes, if we could get our friend Phyllis Hardaway to take care of the kids, John would come drive the car and help manage the Sweets. During those times, we toured together all across America, mostly in the South and in Texas.
This was the South of the late 1960s, and we faced racism on the road at just about every turn. Black people often couldn’t find places to stay, and even when we did, the people in the hotels were sometimes flat-out nasty to us. We had some close calls as we traveled through the South—just trying to get something to eat in on
e of those Jim Crow restaurants could lead to trouble. And forget about calling the police, because they were often just as hostile to us as everybody else.
Once, after we played a show in Texas, the two-bit, racist promoter didn’t want to pay us the money we were owed. John started arguing with him—actually, all the Sweets did, because we were women who didn’t take any stuff. Our pianist, Bernie, also carried a gun for extra protection, although it didn’t have a firing pin, so it was probably more likely to get us into trouble than to get us out of it. Bernie was quick to wave that thing around, though, and with what I’ll call a little aggressive coaxing, we managed to convince that promoter that he should pay us our money. And he did.
It wasn’t all rough times on the road, though—we had a lot of fun, too. I loved all the Sweets—Sylvia, Myrna, and Estelle—and John was a good addition, as he liked to cut up and joke around with everyone. We’d laugh at Bernie, who in addition to playing the piano and waving his gun around was also the wardrobe man, because he always managed to leave something important behind. We’d be getting ready for a show, and Sylvia would yell, “Bernie, where’s my hairpiece?” and he’d just shrug. She’d tell him off using some choice words, and we’d all laugh so hard.
One night, a girl named Deirdre was filling in for Myrna. We were performing in these beautiful beaded shrimp-colored gowns, and as we were on stage, singing our hearts out, I happened to look down at Deidre’s feet. Beneath the hem of that gorgeous gown, she was wearing plain brown loafers. Well, I nearly had a fit right there onstage. After we finished, I gave Bernie hell for that and told him never to do it again. Fun and games were okay, but we were professionals, and I was determined that especially onstage, we would look and act like it.
In fact, the Sweets and the band used to call me “the general,” because I insisted on having things done the right way. I was the oldest of the four women in the Sweets, and I felt responsible for them, but besides that, I just like for things to be in order. Estelle and I were usually on the same side about that, and Myrna and Sylvia were a little more slack. Whenever we needed to, though, we all came together as one. The main thing was that we loved singing—and we loved singing together.
All of that touring and performing paid off. In 1968, besides promoting our own singles and album, the Sweets got to work with some of the biggest names in the music business. We went to Nashville to do a session with Dusty Springfield, and we also did some studio work in New York with Jimi Hendrix on his Electric Ladyland album. And finally, the next year, we got to work with the biggest name of all, Elvis Presley.
When Elvis came back to the stage after doing movies, he wanted the Sweets to come to Vegas and back him at his first big gig at the International Casino. At first, we couldn’t believe it. But Elvis had heard our music back when the Drinkards sang at the Newport Jazz Festival, and I guess we made an impression on him, because he still remembered.
Anyway, the promoters flew us all out to Vegas in July 1969, and they set us up with a big suite at the hotel. When I first met Elvis, my mouth just fell open. This was before he gained all that weight, and he was a gorgeous man—I mean drop-dead gorgeous. And just the sweetest man you can imagine.
John came with us to Vegas, and he and Elvis hit it off. John charmed Elvis’s managers and crew, too, which would end up paying off for us down the road. While the Sweets would be rehearsing with Elvis, John would meet with “the boys” (and they really were good ol’ boys) in the coffee shop and chat with them. He learned a lot from those guys, as they’d been working in the entertainment game for more than a decade and knew it from the bottom up. John was able to put that information to use when I started as a solo act, and again later when Nippy’s career took off.
John just had a way with people—he was charming and could get along with anybody. I remember him hanging with Elvis during rehearsal breaks, joking about stuff most people would never have brought up. John would say things like, “Now, Elvis, are you sure you’re not part black? ’Cause you sure got a lot of rhythm, man.” Elvis would give him that aw-shucks smile and come right back at him. “I don’t know about that,” he’d say. “But John, you do look kinda like my uncle. You’ll have to ask my daddy.” We’d be cracking up, just watching the two of them go at it.
I loved performing with Elvis, but in Vegas you do so many shows in a row that the repetition can get boring. So after a while, I’d start throwing in obbligatos—improvised counter-melodies that floated up over the melody. Whenever I did it, Elvis would always smile and look back at me. He’d tease me about it, too; he said there was something about the sound of those obbligatos that made him think I was squirrelly. So he started calling me “Squirrelly”—his special nickname for me.
Elvis loved singing gospel, and I think he felt something special about having four church sisters singing along with him. After the shows, when you’d think singing was the last thing on our minds, we’d all gather together and jam. And I don’t know if I’d ever met anyone who was as generous as Elvis was. He’d give people things for no reason—even people he barely knew. He gave all the girls in the Sweets lovely diamond bracelets. Mine was solid gold, and inscribed on the outside “To Cissy,” and on the inside, “Squirrelly.” I still have it.
I heard later that Elvis gave one of the girls a car; I believe it was Myrna. There wasn’t anything sneaky about it—I mean, he wasn’t looking for anything from her in return. That’s just the way he was, regular people, despite all the international fame. Elvis was always a gentleman when I knew him, though years later, the girls did kid me that he had a crush on me. All I could do was laugh and say, “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when he was living, you know?”
We were with Elvis in Vegas for almost two months, and by the end I was missing my children desperately. I knew they were in good hands with Phyllis and Bae, and I’d call them every evening just before their bedtime. But it wasn’t the same as being with them, and we all were suffering for it.
My oldest, Gary, never said much on the phone, but he was always one to keep his feelings to himself. And Nippy was so young, she was usually just running around the house, getting into some kind of mess she shouldn’t have been into. Or she’d be watching TV or listening to Michael Jackson, her favorite performer.
My middle child, Michael, was the one I worried about most. From the time he was little, Michael loved family more than anything. Whenever he’d go to a friend’s house for a sleepover, he’d call in the middle of the night, saying, “Come get me! I want to come home!” Michael was a momma’s boy, something he admitted then and still admits today.
When I was gone on tour, Michael always took it harder than the other two. He’d cry so pitifully on the phone, and it just made me want to get up, go to the airport, and fly right home. It broke my heart, but there was nothing I could do. I’d just let him know what I expected him to do the next day, tell him I loved him, and remind him to make sure he prayed before going to bed. I didn’t know what else to do.
Finally, in September 1969, the Sweets got a break from touring. While I was thrilled to get back home to Gary, Michael, and Nippy, I also knew the time had come to face up to the problem that was causing all of us such grief. Yes, touring brought in money, but being on the road was tearing me away from the most important things in my life. My children were growing up quickly, and I felt terrible not being there to help them with their problems, as if I’d just left them to find their own way.
Not only did I miss my children, but I’d also been forced to give up directing my beloved New Hope choir. And though I’d promised my father I would always sing with the family, I was away so much that I could only do it on holidays.
I realized just how far I’d strayed from my family that year when my brother Larry suddenly got sick and fell into a mysterious coma. Larry had been my closest playmate growing up, and I was shocked and upset when he fell ill. I rushed home from the road and spent se
veral days by his side, praying. Larry eventually came out of the coma, but he was never the same.
On top of everything else, life with the Sweets was getting more complicated. The times were changing, and Myrna and Sylvia wanted the Sweets to change, too—they kept pushing me to liven up our act with more revealing outfits onstage, because that’s what other background groups were doing. I wasn’t having any of that, as I saw myself as a mother and role model for my kids, first and foremost. I was onstage to sing, not bounce around and flaunt my business—but the pressure kept growing to do just that.
What could I do? If we ever wanted to get away from Wainwright, money wasn’t just going to drop out of the sky—I was the one who had to make it happen. Touring with the Sweets was the only way I knew how to do it, but even that didn’t seem like it could last forever. The situation felt impossible, and one night I went into my bedroom, shut the door, and just started crying. I cried, and I prayed, desperately trying to figure out how to fix this mess. After a long while, I finally realized that I couldn’t, and that the only thing I could do was put my faith in God to take care of it. At that moment, I turned over my burden and trusted Him to show me the way.
The next morning, I got up, readied myself, and packed a bag for a road trip that would take me away for a week. I said goodbye to Bae in the kitchen, finished my coffee, and started walking out to the car, where John was waiting. The kids were already outside playing as John put my bag in the trunk. I went to hug them goodbye, but when I reached down for Michael, he pulled away from me, plopped his little self down on the curb, and started crying. My heart felt like it might tear in half.
Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped Page 5
