Rise to Fame
A debut album that charted at #166 in 1985 shouldn't become the best-selling debut by a solo artist in history. Hers did, spending 55 weeks climbing to #1 and staying there for 14. She became the first female artist to score three consecutive #1 singles off one album, then set a Guinness record with seven straight Hot 100 #1s from 1985 to 1988, breaking a mark held jointly by The Beatles and The Bee Gees. None of it was accidental. She'd been singing in Newark's New Hope Baptist Church since age 5, with Cissy Houston as her mother and Aretha Franklin as her godmother. The Voice was trained long before the industry found her.
In the Spotlight
The $100 million Arista renewal in 2001 looked like a bet on the biggest voice in pop. It wasn't. The Bobby Brown years had already done the damage, and two underperforming albums later, the voice that once hit notes nobody else could reach had gone raspy and unpredictable. The 2009 comeback album I Look to You returned to #1, suggesting the marriage had suppressed more than just her career. Three years later, she drowned in a Beverly Hilton bathtub. The Grammy telecast the following evening drew 39.9 million viewers, the highest-rated Grammy broadcast of the 21st century. The audience for her grief was bigger than anything she'd pulled while alive.
Side Notes
Her mother Cissy Houston wasn't just a gospel singer, she was a professional: she'd sung backup for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, and founded The Sweet Inspirations, one of the more in-demand backup groups of the 1960s. Growing up in that house, with Dionne Warwick as a cousin and Aretha Franklin as a godmother, meant she had access to mentorship most singers never find. She was recording professionally in her teens, appearing on Chaka Khan's Naughty album. The music industry found her. She was already prepared for it.
Final Chapter
The Clive Davis pre-Grammy party proceeded at the Beverly Hilton that evening, her body still in the building and removed around 12:45 AM. Her memorial at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark on February 18 was televised globally. In January 2015, her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown was found unresponsive in a bathtub; she died in hospice care on July 26, 2015, at 22.