Nitch Drinkard married Delia McCaskill and had eight children. The second oldest of the Drinkard children was Lee. She married Mancel Warrick. They had three children: Delia (named after the grandmother), Mancel Jr. and Dionne. When Dionne produced her first single in 1962, her last name was mis-spelled as Warwick instead of Warrick. She decided to keep Dionne Warwick as her stage name.
They youngest of the Drinkard children was Emily, who went by the nickname “Cissy.” Cissy married John Houston. Cissy and John had three children. The youngest was Whitney.
Whitney Houston is a cousin of Dionne Warwick. Whitney’s mother, the gospel-trained vocalist, Cissy Houston, is an aunt of Dionne. Cissy is the one who taught Whitney how to sing professionally.
Whitney Houston first performed at 9 years old at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, NJ and become extremely famous as a gospel singer over the next few years.
Whitney Houston is the debut studio album by American contemporary R&B and pop singer Whitney Houston. It was released on February 14, 1985, by Arista Records. The album
initially had a slow commercial response but began getting more popular in the summer of 1985. It eventually topped the Billboard 200 for 14 weeks in 1986, generating three number-one singles — “Saving All My Love for You”, “How Will I Know” and “Greatest Love of All” (a cover of “The Greatest Love of All”, originally recorded in 1977 by George Benson) — on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which made it both the first debut album and the first album by a solo female artist to produce three number-one singles.
Dionne Warwick used to describe her cousin Whitney as “the little girl I never had” which just showed how close the pair was.
There has never been a more famous family relation regarding famous Gospel Singers in the United States than that of Dionne Warwick and Whitney Houston.
Whitney died in February 11, 2012 and the following month of March, Dionne revealed in a conversation with Good Morning America that she had spoken to Whitney that day and that she had asked her to attend the Clive Davis’s Grammy Party at the Beverly Hills Hotel that night. “You’ve got to be there for me.” Whitney told her.
Hour later, Whitney was found dead in a bathtub. A death that Dionne described as “surreal” as she asserted Whitney was up and happy, and her vocals getting ready in those days, and that she had everything to live for.