Fans and admirers of the late singer Whitney Houston are in for a difficult year. A memoir by her ex-husband, the R. & B. bad boy Bobby Brown, is due out sometime in June, and a hologram performance of Houston singing her greatest hits has been promised by a billionaire financier from Greece. If half of what has been rumored about Houston’s more unpleasant behavior is true, Brown’s revelations will no doubt be shocking (if anyone is still capable of being shocked by celebrities). But it’s the spectre of a hologram that is more unsettling. So far, the digital smoke and mirrors has been used primarily to summon rappers back from the dead. With their mostly rhythmless gaits, their barely there two-steps, rappers have nothing to fear from herky-jerky virtual projections of themselves synched to a vocal track. But no non-dancer moved among the four corners of a performance stage with more elegance or musical intent than Whitney Houston did.
There is a video of Houston performing a medley of her hits in which nearly every rhythmic gesture has a meaning: a subtle nod of the head signals the start of the song; a purposeful strut upstage and a drop of the arms alerts the band to proceed to the next number; yet another drop of the arms tells the band how long to hold a note; a slow undulation of her left hand tells it to quiet down. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly (almost invisibly) each gesture is built into the performance. Brown’s book may threaten Houston’s legacy as a mother or as a friend, but the “Star Trek”-style hologram threatens her legacy as an artist. And the woman who was once the most famous singer in the world was an incomparable artist.
The first challenge to Houston’s legacy arrived in the early nineties, in the form of Mariah Carey, who, from the very beginning of her career, with her constant vocal runs and obsessive flurry of hands, took certain “black” singing habits to extremes. These were habits that Houston—having been shaped by traditional gospel and its conservative nature, and by her cousin Dionne Warwick’s elegantly restrained performance style—largely eschewed. Despite Carey’s caricature of black stylistics and her mixed racial background, the skin-color difference between her and Houston managed to bring out America’s racism. Houston was subject to the singer’s version of the black athlete’s curse: as the daughter of the gospel great Cissy Houston and a cousin of Dionne, Whitney was regarded as all instinct and natural gifts, whereas Mariah, arranger and songwriter, had a brain.
This was unfair to Houston. I worked for the choreographer Debbie Allen at the Oscars in 1999, when Houston and Carey sang their middling hit “When You Believe,” from “The Prince of Egypt.” Late into a night of rehearsals on the evening before the broadcast, it was discovered, by Houston, that the arrangement wasn’t working, and the rehearsal ground to a halt. (Houston had missed the first day of rehearsal and had shown up so late the next day that her run-through with Carey was pushed to the end of the session.) With none of the musicians in the hall (including Bill Conti, the longtime conductor of Oscars ceremony) able to riddle out a solution, Houston identified the offending chords for the orchestra and created a new arrangement on the spot. The room watched her in awe.
It was this knowledge of how a song should be shaped and her bodily understanding of where her voice should fall that Houston brought to her famous performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1991, at the outset of the first Iraq War, twenty-five years ago today. In its way, the performance remains as influential a moment in television history as Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Houston’s rendition of the anthem is studded with vocal gems and remains a master class in vocal prowess. Its hold on us, however, can be attributed, ultimately, to a single powerful effect: the startlingly beautiful sound Houston makes when she sings the word “free.” This was a sound for the ages.
There was a controversy at the time over whether Houston had lip-synched. She had. The difficult chord changes, the cumbersome phrasing, and the unpredictability of the weather made it standard practice for singers performing the anthem at the Super Bowl to sing to a prerecorded track. (Houston sang the song live not long after, in a hastily arranged TV special, which quieted any doubters.) When Houston was initially asked to sing the anthem, weeks before, she told her longtime bandleader and arranger Rickey Minor that the only version of the song she liked was Marvin Gaye’s performance at the 1983 N.B.A. All-Star Game, with him accompanied by a simple drum machine, a performance now mostly known only to hardcore soul enthusiasts. “It wasn’t rushed,” she said. “He was able to take his time.”
That was enough for Minor, who, in the days before YouTube, tracked down a VHS copy of Gaye’s performance and, together with the composer John Clayton, Jr., made the radical choice to move the song from a 3/4 time signature to 4/4, giving Houston more room inside each measure to nurture the notes. Minor sent the track to Houston, but she never got around to hearing it. “I was busy doing a screen test for a film with Kevin Costner,” she told him as she arrived at the studio, in Miami, to record. Minor played the track, and she listened once through, nodded briefly, and said that she was ready. She walked into the booth and sang one take; it was stunning. Minor asked for one more, for insurance, and then Houston was done. But the version we now know—with its sure-footed, pitch-perfect opening, its forte-piano drop down to a pianissimo on the third line, its jazzy swagger as she takes the curve at the bottom of the song—is ninety per cent what she sang on that original take, only seconds after hearing the arrangement for the first time. It confounds understanding.
The climax of the song was from that first take, too. As Houston’s voice approached the high note on the word “free,” she slowed for suspense and for air, then rang the E-flat above middle C like a bell. With the extra room Minor had given her, she held on to the note for three counts (the traditional score affords “free” only a single count, but Gaye had also lengthened it, whether Houston explicitly remembered that or not). And then, in the split-second relay circuit of choices that we know as instinct, Houston leapt off the back of that E and sent her voice soaring even higher, dragging out the word “free” with a two-note flourish she invented in the recording booth, just as the measure was about to close. It had the sensation of a frighteningly tight line being pulled even tighter. The world would follow.
Barely two weeks after Houston appeared at the Super Bowl, the jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis performed an instrumental version of the anthem with the pianist Bruce Hornsby at the N.B.A. All-Star Game in Philadelphia. It was slow and almost eerie in its beauty. Like Houston, Marsalis slowed down before the climax, bracketing it off from the rest of the song, then delivered on Houston’s keening flourish on the word “free,” holding it for four counts and making the note (and the word) the emotional high point of the song. At Obama’s second Inauguration, in 2013, Beyoncé sang the anthem and included Houston’s flourish. She, too, held the note (and word) for four counts. Since Houston’s performance, every lesser light with the range and the nerve—Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and even the cast of “Glee”—has performed some version of her dramatic flourish on the word “free.” (Though nearly all of them dropped her beautiful stutter step in favor of a much easier-to-perform melisma.) Even Patti Labelle and Mariah Carey tried to follow suit, with Carey doing a self-conscious end run around the flourish, by shooting up into her whistle register to start the note and then descending down the scale to close it out.
It has been said that an artist who teaches other artists nothing teaches no one and two years ago another artist showed herself to be a faithful student of Houston. Renée Fleming, perhaps the most respected opera soprano in the world, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2014 Super Bowl, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, becoming the first classical singer to perform at the N.F.L. championship. Watching Fleming at the mike, in an elegant floor-length gown (Houston had worn a simple track suit), I wondered what the famous lyric soprano, who had interpreted everyone from Mozart to Verdi and Jefferson Airplane, would do when the critical moment came. And then, suddenly, there she was, raising her arm with gospel feeling, nailing the high note, then tightening her voice to send it vaulting into the heavens on the wings of Houston’s ghost. Fleming held the flourish—and the word—for eight counts. To borrow from the critic Helen Vendler, it was as if, twenty-five years ago, those notes that Houston wrote into the song were somehow simply hiding in the air waiting to be found and, once Houston had seen and sung them, they would never be hidden again.
Needless to say, Houston’s version wasn’t just a revolution in music; it was a revolution in meaning. Black Americans have long felt ambivalent about “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1904, the N.A.A.C.P. dubbed James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro National Anthem,” partly as a reflection of this ambivalence; black people still stand when it’s played. When there has been need for a patriotic song, black leaders have more often turned to “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” or “America the Beautiful.” Martin Luther King, Jr., drew on the first at the March on Washington; Ray Charles memorably remade the second. As for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the machinery of state violence has too often been used against black people for a song about bombs and rockets to hold much appeal. But Houston inaugurated a change.
Several years ago, I was at a Christmas party at home in the South when the host, a local gospel singer, was asked to sing before any official carolling got under way. He sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” flourish and all. No one was discomfited. By making the idea of freedom the emotional and structural high point (not just the high note) of the anthem, Houston unlocked that iron door for black people and helped make the song a part of our cultural patrimony, too. It was the most influential performance of a national song since Marian Anderson sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of the Second World War. Now when we listen to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it is the echo of Houston’s voice we hear. In the instant of her singing, a quarter century ago, Houston changed what it sounded like to be American.
For this, she should be duly remembered.
