Origins The history of the Sweet Inspirations started at the
New Hope Baptist Church in
Newark, New Jersey during the
1950s where
Emily "Cissy" Drinkard was the Minister of Music leading several youth choirs. Among the young singers she mentored were her preteen nieces
Dionne,
Dee Dee,
Judy Guions and Sylvia Shemwell and their friend
Doris Troy. By 1954, Judy had joined Cissy Drinkard's sibling gospel group
the Drinkard Singers. Both Judy and Sylvia had been adopted by Cissy's sister Lee, another member of the Drinkard Singers and mother of Dionne and Dee Dee. By 1958, Dionne, Dee Dee, Sylvia Shemwell and Doris Troy agreed to form the group the Gospelaires and eventually opened for the Drinkard Singers, finding success at the
Apollo Theater in 1959 and were at this point being managed by Cissy's then-boyfriend John Russell Houston Jr. That year, while at the Apollo, a record label scout approached them backstage looking for background singers for a session for a musician named Sam "The Man" Taylor to which the Gospelaires agreed to sing on. Following that session and another with
The Drifters, the group became professional
session vocalists. By September 1961, John Houston Jr. convinced Cissy to join a session for
Ronnie Hawkins after Dionne began working with
Burt Bacharach, which led to Cissy Drinkard, who would later go by the name of Cissy Houston, officially joining the group. Within a couple of years, Dee Dee and Troy all left the group. Houston eventually replaced them with
Myrna Smith, a New Hope choir member, and 17-year-old Estelle Brown, which formed the nucleus of the Sweet Inspirations. In October 2007, Morrison was awarded a Million-Air certificate by
BMI for 8 million air plays of "Brown Eyed Girl". Shortly afterwards, the group, who were now known under the nickname "The Group", was approached by
Jerry Wexler to sign a recording deal with
Atlantic Records, the parent label of Morrison's Bang label under the condition they sign as The Inspirations. After discovering that another group went by that name, Wexler added "Sweet" in front of the name. The Sweet Inspirations recorded by themselves for the first time in April 1967 for
Atlantic Records. That session produced the first two singles released by Atlantic, a version of "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)," a song previously recorded by
The Staple Singers and a soulful version of "Let It Be Me", a French song which had been a pop and R&B hit for
Betty Everett and
Jerry Butler in 1964. Though their first singles were only minor hits with "Let It Be Me" peaking inside the R&B top twenty, Atlantic was committed to the group, and an August session in
Memphis yielded the bulk of songs used for the group's
self-titled debut album, released in the late fall of 1967. Within a month of their chart climb, the group began work on their second album – a gospel record entitled
Songs Of Faith & Inspiration. It was released in 1968 under the name "Cissy Drinkard & The Sweet Inspirations." On March 30, 1968, the group scored their first and only top forty hit on the
Billboard Hot 100 with the song "
Sweet Inspiration" on Atlantic Records. The group joined
Martha and the Vandellas and
The Supremes as the only other all-female vocal group in history to earn a Grammy nomination. The b-side of "Sweet Inspiration", a
funky cover of
The Ikettes' "
I'm Blue", gained notoriety more than a quarter century later when it was sampled by hip-hop group
Salt-N-Pepa's 1993 smash hit, "
Shoop". In 1967, the group did backing vocals for the
Jimi Hendrix single "
Burning of the Midnight Lamp" which was later featured on the album
Electric Ladyland in 1968. They also backed
Dusty Springfield on her album
Dusty in Memphis. She died on December 24, 2010. Ann Williams died on October 1, 2013. Smith was replaced with Los Angeles–based singer Kelly Jones; , the Sweet Inspirations are continuing to perform backup vocals with
Elvis: The Concert and continue to do many concerts worldwide with Elvis Presley Enterprises' first ever "Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist", Shawn Klush, sometimes as a duo and other times as a trio. On October 7, 2024, group founder Cissy Houston died in her sleep from complications of
Alzheimer's disease at the age of 91 in her home of Newark, New Jersey, leaving Estelle Brown as the only surviving member of the original group. In 2014, Houston and Brown accepted the Sweet Inspirations' induction into the
National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, the same night Houston's daughter,
Whitney, was posthumously inducted. ==Members==