Singer Cissy Houston dies at age 91
Dated September 30, 2010 filed photo shows US singer Cissy Houston and daughter singer Whitney Houston attending the 2010 Keep A Child Alive's Black Ball at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images / AFP / FILES
Grammy award winning singer and the mother of Whitney Houston, Cissy Houston has died at the age of 91.
A family spokesperson said Houston was surrounded by family as she passed away at her Newark, New Jersey home on Monday (October 7) while under hospice care for Alzheimer's disease.
Pat Houston, Cissy's daughter-in-law, expressed the family's grief in a heartfelt statement. “Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness. We have lost the matriarch of our family,” she said. “Mother Cissy has been a strong and towering figure in our lives. Her contributions to popular music and culture are unparalleled."
Cissy Houston's career spanned more than seven decades and is filled with numerous accolades including two Grammy awards.
The family statement ends, “May she rest in peace, alongside her daughter, Whitney and granddaughter Bobbi Kristina and other cherished family members.”
Whitney Houston won six of her own Grammys during her 25-year career and died in 2012 aged 48, after drowning in a hotel bathtub.
In 2015 Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only child of Houston and R&B singer Bobby Brown, died at an Atlanta-area hospice after an unexplained incident that left her unresponsive in a bathtub in her suburban Atlanta home.
