Whitney Houston
1963 — 2012 · Singer and actress; principal vocal stylist of late-twentieth-century popular ballad; the only artist to have charted seven consecutive number-one Billboard Hot 100 singles
Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born on the ninth of August 1963 at Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of three children of John Russell Houston — a U.S. Army Air Corps veteran and entertainment executive — and Cissy Houston, a gospel and soul vocalist of considerable reputation in her own right. The Houston family was a substantial musical lineage: she was the cousin of Dionne Warwick, the goddaughter of Aretha Franklin (placed in this archive), and the niece of the Sweet Inspirations singer Dee Dee Warwick. She grew up at East Orange, New Jersey, in the Mount Vernon district. She sang in the Junior Choir of the New Hope Baptist Church of Newark from her eleventh year under her mother's direction.
She began modelling for the Click Models agency at fourteen and recording session-vocal work alongside her mother on Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls recordings. She was discovered at the Sweetwater's nightclub on Manhattan's Upper West Side by the Arista Records founder Clive Davis in 1983 and signed with Arista in April 1983. She was eighteen.
She released the debut album Whitney Houston in February 1985. The album occupied the Billboard 200 for fourteen weeks at number one and yielded the singles "Saving All My Love for You," "How Will I Know," and "Greatest Love of All" — three consecutive number-one Billboard Hot 100 singles, the first time a debut album by a female artist of any genre had produced three. The follow-up Whitney of June 1987 produced four further number-one singles. The seven consecutive number-one singles produced across the years 1985 to 1988 — running from "Saving All My Love for You" through "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" — remain the longest unbroken run of number-one Hot 100 singles by any artist.
She made her film debut in The Bodyguard in 1992. The soundtrack album — including her recording of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" — sold over forty-five million copies worldwide and remains the highest-selling soundtrack album of all time. She subsequently starred in Waiting to Exhale (1995), The Preacher's Wife (1996), and the 2012 Sparkle.
She received eight Grammy Awards, the BET Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, the World Music Award for Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium in 2000, and the Recording Industry Association of America's certification at one hundred and seventy million records sold across her career.
She died of accidental drowning at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on the eleventh of February 2012, at forty-eight.
She is honored here as one of the great vocalists of late-twentieth-century popular music.
Curated with honor.
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Placed in the archive by the Honored Ancestors editorial team.