Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston, born in 1963, American pop-music superstar, known for her soaring gospel-based vocals, who was the first performer to have seven consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard magazine pop-music charts. Houston was born into a musical family in Newark, New Jersey, daughter of Cissy Houston, a gospel music singer and former backup vocalist for Elvis Presley, and cousin of pop singer Dionne Warwick. Houston began her own singing career with a gospel choir when she was 11 years old. As a teenager, she sang backup for such rhythm-and-blues (R&B) singers as Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls. In addition, Houston modeled professionally and acted in two small roles on television programs. In 1985 she released her first album, Whitney Houston, which went to number one on the Billboard pop-music charts that year. The song “Saving All My Love for You” earned Houston her first Grammy Award (1986). Her second album, Whitney (1987), won her a second Grammy Award (1988), for the song “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” and she became the first pop singer to sell ten million copies each of her first two albums.

Houston's third album, the R&B-influenced I'm Your Baby Tonight, was released in 1990. The following year she married American R&B singer Bobby Brown. In 1992 Houston scored an enormous motion-picture success, starring opposite American actor Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. The following year she surpassed her previous successes with a hit song from that movie, “I Will Always Love You” (originally written in 1974 by American country-music singer and songwriter Dolly Parton). Houston dominated the 1994 Grammy Awards, winning four major honors; by then she had established herself as the top-selling vocalist of the early 1990s. In 1995 she costarred in the motion picture Waiting to Exhale, and the following year she costarred with American actor Denzel Washington in The Preacher’s Wife. Houston also sang on the film’s soundtrack.

See also Blues; Rock Music.