Mourners remember Whitney Houston’s ‘powerful music’
Whitney Houston’s funeral is held with gospel choirs, a host of superstars from the world of black music and a golden hearse.
Celebrities, friends and relatives have paid tribute to Whitney Houston at the star’s funeral in the church where she first learned to sing.
Soul, gospel and pop music greats including Alicia Keys, Stevie Wonder, R Kelly and Houston’s cousin Dionne Warwick spoke and sang at the service.
Actor Kevin Costner urged mourners to “dry our tears, suspend our sorrow – and perhaps our anger – just long enough, just long enough to remember the sweet miracle of Whitney.”
Record producer Clive Davis, who discovered and guided Houston throughout her career, also spoke at the service, which Oprah Winfrey and Mariah Carey attended.
Her ex-husband Bobby Brown was seen to walk to her flower-covered coffin at the front of New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, and touch it before walking out.
Before the service, the church choir clapped and sang uplifting gospel songs accompanied by a band.
Houston, who died in a Beverly Hills hotel room last week aged 48, enjoyed a 30-year career that peaked with her 1992 signature hit “I Will Always Love You” and paved the way for a generation of singers that followed her.
Guests crowded into pews at the invitation-only service at the New Hope Baptist Church in a modest neighborhood in her native Newark, New Jersey. Houston honed her powerful voice as a young gospel singer in the church’s choir with her mother, Cissy Houston, who was a backup singer for Aretha Franklin.
“Her legacy is her powerful music,” civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson told reporters outside the red-brick church.
Houston was among the greatest singers of the 1980s and 1990s, but her personal life and marriage to singer Bobby Brown was tumultuous. She admitted to heavy use of cocaine, marijuana, alcohol and prescription pills.
Her death at age 48 shocked her family, fans and the music industry. Houston was found underwater in a hotel bathtub on the eve of the music industry’s Grammy Awards. A cause of death has yet to be determined.
Houston’s family decided against a public memorial, as was done for pop star Michael Jackson after his 2009 death, but they agreed to allow the service to be broadcast live by television networks and on the Internet.
After her debut, her popularity grew exponentially with her second album, “Whitney” (1987), with all four singles – “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”, “So Emotional”, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” – hitting No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Her music videos featuring her 1980s style and innocent, fun-loving image made her wildly popular around the world. In the 1992 movie The Bodyguard, co-starring Costner, Houston played a character not far removed from her real self: an international singing sensation coping with fame.
But the 15-year period when she was married to singer Brown coincided with a decline in the quality and frequency of her albums. The couple, who have an 18-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, divorced in 2007.
Houston’s powerful voice suffered in recent years. On her last world tour in 2010, she struggled to hit high notes.
She spoke publicly about her struggles with addiction. In a 2002 interview, TV journalist Diane Sawyer asked Houston what was the “biggest devil” among her failings. Houston answered: “Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. So the bigger devil is me, I am either my best friend or my worst enemy.”