Word: whitneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What she cares about, has always cared about, is music. Gary Garland remembers the child Whitney, "dressed up in mother's gowns, down in the basement, singing her lungs out like she was in Madison Square Garden." At eleven, Whitney made her solo debut singing Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah at the local Baptist church. "I was scared to death," she recalls. "I was aware of people staring at me. No one moved. They seemed almost in a trance. I just stared at the clock in the center of the church. When I finished, everyone clapped and started crying...
Then began the musical education of Whitney Houston, courtesy of Cissy. "I taught her that you don't start loud," Cissy says, "because then you have no place to go. I taught her that songs tell a story, and you don't blare out a story. Control is the basis for singing: up, down, soft, sweet. And diction was very important." You can hear the fruit of Cissy's lessons even in a dance tune like How Will I Know. In the refrain "If he loves me,/ If he loves me not," Whitney really punches that final t. No wonder...
...first industry angels were Eugene Harvey and Seymour Flics, then concert promoters, now Whitney's zealous managers and jealous protectors. In 1981 the team devised a game plan: they would develop acting and modeling as adjuncts to the music. Soon Whitney was doing a Canada Dry commercial and TV's Silver Spoons and Gimme a Break. She had already been cutting classes at her private Catholic girls' school to model for the Click agency. She later switched to Wilhelmina and appeared in Glamour and Vogue. Meanwhile she was sharing club dates with Cissy. Finally, at 18, she was ready...
...Clive Davis was ready for Whitney. Earlier, he had helped launch the careers of Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow and Billy Joel. Now he would steer Whitney Houston to middle-of-the-road music. Gerry Griffith, then Arista's A.- and-R. chief, had recommended Whitney to Davis and set up an audition. "Clive sat there poker-faced," recalls Flics. "He said thank you and left. The next day we got an enthusiastic offer." In 1983 Arista signed her, with a "key man" clause: if Davis leaves the company, Whitney can go with...
...charts and No. 3 pop. Then Saving All My Love hit No. 1 R. and B. and No. 1 pop. It's ironic, but Top 40 stations give more exposure to ballads by certain black artists than to those by most whites. Whitney is helping to maintain the ballad tradition." The third single, How Will I Know, brought her to the teens and to MTV, which black artists have traditionally found tough to crack. And Greatest Love became Whitney's top-selling single. Says Davis: "It put the album in a totally different category...