Whitney And Cissy Houston Both Remembered Elvis | Their Answer Wasn’t What Fans Expected

Well, when they first called the girl said, “Elvis Presley.” Oh my god.  That’s Houston. And the name that made her whole group out loud. That’s  Elvis Presley. Now, hold on a second. Because these women weren’t fans in a crowd. They were professional  singers. Their job was to stand a few feet behind Elvis  night after night and give him the voices underneath his own.

So why would  singers of that caliber hear his name and react like that? What were they bracing for? And that reaction opens onto a much bigger question, the one people have been arguing about for almost 70  years. Was Elvis Presley the man some of his critics describe? Or was he the man these women actually  came to know, standing close enough to see everything? Because Houston worked beside him.

  And years later, her daughter would remember being a small child in a room where he walked in. Two generations of one family, both with an Elvis story. And what they  describe does not match the version you may have heard. This is commentary built on publicly available interviews and  documented history. Where accounts differ or where something is one person’s memory told her way, I’ll say so.

 Memphis roots, Las Vegas  lights, the summer of 1969. Let me walk you through  exactly what they said. First, who were these women? Because that matters for everything that follows. By the late 1960s,  Houston was one of the most in demand voices in American music that most  of the public had never heard of.

 She and a rotating group of session singers were the sound underneath other people’s hits. In 1967,  an Atlantic Records executive named Jerry Wexler heard how much lift they gave a record.  He named it  Sweet Inspirations cuz he said we gave so much inspiration in our songs and whatnot. So he just they put sweet there. Okay.

 So we assumed that name Sweet Inspirations  and gave them a name of their own, the Sweet  Inspirations. And they were everywhere even if their name wasn’t. They sang behind Artha Franklin through the years that made her the queen of soul. Sissy’s daughter put it plainly, so keep that in mind. When Elvis’s  people came calling, they weren’t hiring unknowns.

 They were hiring the women who’d already  built the wall of sound behind Artha Franklin. And the timing is everything here. Because in 1969, Elvis  Presley had something to prove. For most of the decade, he’d been making movies one after another,  the songs getting lighter, the man himself further and further from the stage.

 Then,  in December of 1968, he stepped in front of an NBC television camera for a special that  would go down in history. It was his first television appearance in more than 8 years, and it relit something. But a TV special is one thing. A live audience in a room is another. And that’s what came next.

 In the summer of 1969, Elvis returned to a live stage, a residency at the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas. His first real concert run in years. He needed a band. And he needed voices.  He didn’t just hire one group. He hired two. A men’s gospel quartet called the  Imperials and the Women of the Sweet Inspirations.

Hold on to that detail. two groups. It comes back later and it matters more than it looks. Sissy’s daughter remembered the phone call that started it all.  They also sang for Artha for many, many years on most of the uh  in the 60s.  They were on all of the tha songs.  Now, Whitney runs two moments together there, the television comeback and the Vegas return. Easy to do.

 She was a small child at the time, but the sequence is clear in the record. The TV special came first in late 1968. The Las Vegas run came the following summer,  and that run is what her mother packed a bag for. Which brings us back to the groan you heard at the very start. Because the offer that looked from the outside like the chance of a lifetime  did not land that way inside the group.

I really don’t know what how old I was at the time, but I remember my mother uh receiving  a phone call from whomever Elvis had  employed to call people, whatever, and um saying that he wanted the sweets back to do his comeback show in Vegas.  There it is. That’s the payoff to the reaction that opened this video.

 Listen to what actually happened in that room. The other women hesitate and  the contractor, the one who books the work, cuts through it with one flat line. It’s a gig and it’s a good one. No drama, no speech.  Just a working musician who knows a good job when she hears one.

 But notice she doesn’t tell us why they hesitated.  She lets it sit there. And that’s the honest part of her account because whatever the group was bracing  for, Sissy’s whole story is about what they found when they got there instead. Well, when they first come, the girl said, “I was pregnant.” Oh my god. What are we going to do? [laughter] I said, “Hey, it’s a good and it’s a good one.

”  Nothing like what we might have thought. Hold on to that sentence.  It’s going to echo through everything says next because it’s the shape of her entire memory. She walked in expecting one thing and met another. Now, before we go deeper into what saw at work, there’s another witness in this family,  a much smaller one, because while her mother was in that international hotel, a little girl back home was old enough to catch the  edges of it.

 And at some point, the family close to Elvis backstage  the way working families are. That little girl ended up in a room with him. She was maybe 5 or 6 years old, and she never forgot it. We went and when we got there, it was nothing like what we might have thought, you know, because it was just wonderful.  It was really wonderful.

 You don’t meet Elvis. You look at Elvis out of the mouth of a woman remembering herself as a child. Let that image do its own work for a second. She describes the moment like a photograph. A room full of the singers and their  families. The usual backstage hum and then the door.

 It wasn’t actually, you don’t really meet Elvis. You actually just look at Elvis.  Okay.  Nobody speaks. A room  full of grown professionals, people who worked with Artha Franklin, and a child. And not one of them says a word.  They just look. She’s careful to tell you it wasn’t the polite thing you’d imagine.  He just walks in the room with his mink on, with his glasses on.

 [laughter] Oh my god.  And he just walks in. He says something and everybody just You don’t say anything. You just [laughter] look. That’s the presence people are always trying to describe and never quite can. Whitney doesn’t reach for a big word.  She just says, “You looked.” And it stayed with her for the rest of her life.

 If you’ve ever wondered what Elvis was actually like in a room, not the legend, the man witnesses describe.  That’s the whole reason this channel exists. It’s called  Retro Secrets. And we tell Elvis’s story through the people who were there. subscribe and  stand in these rooms with us. So that’s the child’s view.

 Pure awe from a distance. But Sissy’s  view is different. didn’t look at Elvis across a room. worked with him 5 weeks. Close up. And close up she saw something the awe never shows you. She remembers the pay was good and the room was easy.   One of those moments I won’t forget as a kid. It wasn’t like, “Hi, Mr. Elvis.

Nice to meet you.” You didn’t do that. You just  sat back and just just looked at him.  I loved him. He was such a gentleman from a woman who weeks earlier had to talk her own group into taking the job. And here’s a  detail most Elvis stories skip entirely when the rehearsing was done.

 These were church raised singers. And so it  turned out was he.  And it was wonderful. He was wonderful. I loved him. He was such a gentleman and all that to me, you know.  Picture that. the biggest star on the planet in a Las Vegas rehearsal hall in 1969. And after the work is done, he doesn’t call for  anything.

 He starts a gospel song. And the women who grew up in the Newark church and the men of the Imperials fall in around him. No cameras, no audience,  just the singing they all came up on. That’s not a small thing. That’s a  man reaching for the music of the black church. the same music that shaped him as a poor kid in the South long before any of this.

 And he reaches for it in private when there’s nobody to perform it for. And he was fun. This is the part clearly enjoys telling.   But he was into gospel. So every once in a while when we finish rehearsing with him, we just sing gospel, all of us, you know.  And there’s a documented moment that proves she isn’t just being kind in hindsight.

On the night of August 26th, 1969, during Are  You Lonesome Tonight? Elvis got the giggles on stage and couldn’t stop. Reportedly set off by Houston herself, calmly holding her high part while he came apart  laughing beside her. Fans have traded that recording for decades. Sissy’s memory of a man who’d crack up mid song. There’s  tape of it.

So, a gentleman, generous, funny, singing gospel in his off hours with a black vocal group he’d personally hired. Hold all of that. Because now we come to the question, this whole video has been circling. The reason a lot of you clicked for almost 70 years, one accusation has followed Elvis Presley’s name, and the people  best placed to answer it are the ones who stood three feet behind him.

 Here’s the background told carefully because it deserves care. Back in 1957, at the height of Elvis’s early fame, a crude and racially demeaning remark began circulating. A line supposedly said by  Elvis dismissing black people. It spread fast. It stuck. For a lot of people, it became the whole story. There was just  one problem.

 It appears he never said it. A blackowned magazine called Jet sent a reporter, Louisie Robinson, to run the rumor down. He tried to trace it to its source and couldn’t. His own  line was that chasing it was like chasing a gopher underground. Every hole it dived into, it popped out of another.

 The specifics didn’t hold up. The remark was said to have been made in Boston, a city Elvis had never set foot in, and on a television program he’d never appeared on. So Robinson went to Elvis directly on a movie set  and asked him flat out. Elvis’s answer quoted in Jet in 1957 was this. I never said anything like that.

 And people who know me know I  wouldn’t have said it. Robinson came away convinced the line was a lie. And over the years, black artists  who actually knew Elvis, BB King among them, a man who’d crossed paths with him back in the Memphis days,  spoke about him with warmth, not grievance. But that’s the historical  record, argued at a distance.

 What we have here is something rarer. A woman who stood next to him for weeks  and was asked point blank.  So good-looking, you just didn’t want to even look now. Well, [laughter] he was. He was so handsome,  but he was just as nice, fun, you know, he cracked jokes and all that kind of crap. And you  I never felt his prejudice.

 She goes further.  People said he was prejudice. I said, well, I never felt his prejudice  and I don’t think he was prejudice. You know,  and this is why  I asked you to hold on to that detail about two groups because isn’t offering an opinion here. She’s offering  evidence. Look at who Elvis chose to put on that stage with him.

 a black women’s group and a white men’s group side by  side night night after night in 1969. Not a gesture, a payroll. His own hiring in the room where she could see it. She says it treated as obvious because to her it was. I want to stop right here and ask you something. Whose word carries more weight to you?  A rumor that couldn’t be traced to a single real place or a woman who stood 3 ft from him for 5 weeks? Tell me in the comments. I read them.

 Now, and this is where an honest channel has  to stay honest. also draws a line around what she can and can’t tell you. She’s not claiming to know his whole heart.  He treated everyone  everyone the same.  Yeah.  He had  black singers and white singers. He’s had the Imperials who was a men’s group, very popular men’s group.

 And we were the girls group inspiration. That’s important and I  don’t want to skate past it. Siss’s testimony covers what she saw, the rehearsals, the stage, the  gospel afterward, the way he treated the people he’d hired. She’s telling you what she witnessed, not what he  was when the doors closed and everyone went home.

 And somehow that makes her account  stronger, not weaker. Because she’s not selling you a saint. She’s a professional telling you what she observed on the clock and  refusing to pretend she knew more than she did. She even names the stereotypes head on.  We didn’t go around with him as his friends. We worked for  him.

 So, we saw him at work or at rehearsals. So, I don’t know what he did in between, nor did I care.  So, here’s where the evidence actually leaves us. And I’d rather give you the honest answer than a tidy one. What’s documented? Elvis hired a black women’s group and a white men’s group and put them on  the same stage.

 He sang gospel with them off the clock. The single most famous accusation against him was investigated in 1957  by a black publication and could not be traced to any real event and he denied it on the record. What’s testimony? Sissy’s account told her way, that he was a gentleman, that she loved  working for him, that in five weeks beside him, she never once felt the prejudice people  warned her about, and what stays open, by her own admission, what Elvis was in the private hours, she never shared. She won’t

guess. Neither will I. But there’s one more thread I told you we’d come back to, and it turns this whole story into something bigger than one job in Las Vegas. Because Houston didn’t stay with the sweet  inspirations. Not long after the Elvis years, she walked away from the group entirely. And the reason is the quiet  heart of this whole story.

 I think people have, you know, certain  stereotypes about him.  I think so.  Yeah.  She went home to her children. And you already met one of them  tonight. Go back to that little girl in the room. The one who said you don’t meet Elvis. You just look at him. That child was Sissy’s daughter, and her name was Whitney Houston.

 The woman who stood behind Elvis went home to raise the woman who would one day become one of the biggest voices the world has ever heard. Two of the greatest singers of the 20th century, mother and daughter. And Elvis Presley stands right there in the middle of their family story. Listen again to how the child remembered his sheer presence.

 Why’d you leave the group?  He’s dead. Huh?  Why did you leave the group? because my children were getting bigger and I felt that they really needed me home.  And the mother before she ever went home to raise that voice told a phone she’d chosen this life  so her children would never go without.

 Amazing.  Amazing. Amazing to look at.  Yeah.  Just amazing. Just to be in his presence was awesome.  So, here’s where I’ll leave it with you. For almost 70 years, the argument about Elvis and race has mostly been carried by people who never met him, repeating a line no one could ever trace.

 And for those same 70 years, a woman who actually stood beside him five weeks close enough to see everything on that stage gave a completely different answer. She just wasn’t as loud. So, who do you believe, the rumor or the witness?  Houston said she never felt his prejudice and she pointed to who he put on stage as her proof.

Does that change how you see him? I genuinely want to know. Leave it in the comments because on this channel, the comments are the conversation. If this is the kind of Elvis story you’ve been looking for, told through the people who were actually in the room,  subscribe to Retro Secrets and hit the like button so more people find it.

 I’ll see you in the next one. Mommy loves you and mommy wants to stay home, but mommy’s got to go to work to make sure that you have this