Goodbye, Whitney

I want to remember her young, smiling, happy, and optimistic.

I’ll try to remember her like that.

Goodbye, Whitney.

16 Comments

rikyrah on February 11, 2012 at 10:41 pm

I am stunned. I mean, we all know about her demons, but I’m stunned.

She was THE VOICE. People throw around `gift from God’, but, let’s be honest, Whitney Houston’s voice was a `gift’. SO many female `singers’ these days are mere poseurs, but Whitney was the real thing. RIP, Whitney.

BooMan on February 11, 2012 at 10:54 pm

Yup. Lionel Ritchie was just on CNN saying that she had the best voice he’s ever heard and that she could hit any note, at any time, and at any volume.
- Oui on February 15, 2012 at 1:07 pm
  
  .
  
  Who is Cissy Houston?
  
  In the 1990s she returned to her gospel roots, and won a Grammy Award in 1996 for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album for “Face to Face.” Cissy Houston won another Best Traditional Soup Gospel Album Grammy in 1998 for “He Leadeth Me.”
  
  Cissy recorded many songs with her daughter Whitney Houston, including the 1987 duet cover, “I Know Him So Well,” and 2006’s “Family First,” which also features Cissy’s niece Dionne Warwick.
  
  "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Errol on February 11, 2012 at 11:06 pm

So sad

BooMan on February 11, 2012 at 11:10 pm

It’s weird that she talked to her mom and Dionne shortly before she died and everything seemed fine.
- Errol on February 11, 2012 at 11:27 pm
  
  What I read said no sign of drug use. Could be heart attack or something. I don’t know what was happening with her recently.
  - BooMan on February 11, 2012 at 11:41 pm
    
    Well, look at her grandparents on her mother’s side.
    
    In 1938 when [Cissy] Houston was 5 years old her mother, Delia, suffered a stroke and died of cerebral hemorrhage three years later. Her father later died of stomach cancer in 1951 when Houston was 18.
    
    Her grandmother was either 39 or 40 when she died, and 36 or 37 when she had her stroke.
    - Errol on February 12, 2012 at 12:07 am
      
      yes, could be stroke. I would think the Grammys would be a pretty stressful event for her and stress also contributes to stroke
    - BooMan on February 12, 2012 at 12:34 am
      
      Reminds me of Billie Holiday, although I would never say that Houston was in the same league. Houston might have had a better voice, but nowhere near the style.
      
      In early 1959 she found out that she had cirrhosis of the liver. The doctor told her to stop drinking, which she did for a short time, but soon returned to heavy drinking.[86] By May she had lost twenty pounds. Friends Leonard Feather, Joe Glaser, and Allan Morrison tried to get her to check into to a hospital, but she put them off.[87]
      On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities.[81] Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her person. Her funeral mass was held at Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City.
      Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had been the narrator at Billie Holiday’s 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts and had partly written the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday (see above), described her death in these same 1961-dated sleeve notes:
      
      Billie Holiday died in the Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her … The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.
    - Errol on February 12, 2012 at 1:10 am
      
      Just awful. I didn’t know circumstances of Billie Holiday’s death. so awful that they added to her injury by arresting her. For Whitney, I think it would be very difficult to come to terms with the fact that her voice was ruined. Although I blame Bobby Brown for a lot of it, I think equally it’s difficult for ppl in the spotlight to find the privacy to deal with their issues

Don Durito on February 11, 2012 at 11:32 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_rId-X64hg

BooMan on February 11, 2012 at 11:37 pm

use the old embed code. It’s a box you can check at YouTube.
- Don Durito on February 11, 2012 at 11:48 pm
  
  Thanks – here it is:
  
  This is the track from a 1982 album by Bill Laswell’s outfit, Material.