Clarion-Call-Voiced Singer Dead
She’s Amongst Her Generation’s Greatest Singers

By RACHEL S. JONES
Special to the Chronicle

LOS ANGELES--Whitney Houston, the multimillion-selling singer who emerged in the 1980’s as one of her generation’s greatest rhythm & blues voices, only to deteriorate through years of cocaine use and an abusive marriage, died on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif. 
She was 48.
Her death came as the music industry descended on Los Angeles for the annual celebration of the Grammy Awards.  She was to have attended a pre-Grammy party Saturday night being hosted by hosted by Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, who had been her pop mentor.
Miss Houston was found in her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel and paramedics were unable to revive her, the authorities said.  She was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m.  The cause of death is under investigation, but the police said there were no signs of foul play.
From the start of her career more than two decades ago, Miss Houston had the talent, looks and pedigree of a pop superstar. 
She was the daughter of Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who had backed up Aretha Franklin, and the cousin of Dionne Warwick.  (Miss Franklin is Miss Houston’s godmother.)
Miss Houston’s range spanned three octaves, and her voice was and instrument of power and purity:  plush, vibrant and often spectacular.  She could pour on the exuberant flourishes of gospel or peal a simple pop chorus; she could sing sweetly or unleash a sultry rasp. 
And in her triumphal years, she applied that voice to songs full of positive spirit, exulting in love and calling for dignity.
Dressed in everything from formal gowns to T-shirts, she cultivated the image of a fun-loving but ardent good girl, the voice behind songs as perky as “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and as torchy as the one that became her signature song, a version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”
But by the mid-1990’s, even as she was moving into acting with films like “The Bodyguard” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” she became what she described, in a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, as a “heavy” user of marijuana and cocaine. 
By the 2000's she was struggling; her voice grew smaller, scratchier and less secure, and her performances grew erratic.
All of Miss Houston’s studio albums were million-sellers, and two have sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone:  her 1985 debut album and the 1992 soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” which includes “I Will Always Love You.” 
She sold more than 55 million albums in the United States, and tens of millions more abroad. 
The Recording Industry Association of America, which tallies sales, named her the best-selling female R&B singer of the 20th Century.
But her marriage to the singer Bobby Brown--which was, at one point, documented in a Bravo reality television series, “Being Bobby Brown”--grew miserable, and in the 2000's, her singles slipped from the top 10. 
Miss Houston became a tabloid subject:  the National Enquirer ran a photo of her bathroom showing drug paraphernalia. 
And each new album--“Just Whitney” in 2002 and “I Look to You” in 2009--became a comeback.
At Central Park in 2009, singing for “Good Morning America,” her voice was frayed, and on the international tour that followed the release of the album, “I Look to You,” that year, she was often shaky--no longer the invincible performer the world had known.
Whitney Houston was born on Aug. 9, 1963, in Newark.  She sang in church. 
As a teenager in the 1970's and early 1980's, she did some modeling and worked as a backup studio singer and featured vocalist with acts, including Chaka Khan, the Neville Brothers and Bill Laswell’s Material.
Mr. Davis signed her after hearing her perform in a New York City nightclub, and spent two years supervising production of the album, “Whitney Houston,” which was released in 1985. 
It placed her remarkable voice in polished, catchy songs that straddled pop and R&B, and it included three No. 1 singles:  “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “The Greatest Love of All.”
Despite the success of her debut album, Miss Houston was ruled ineligible for the best new artist category of the Grammy Awards because she had been credited on previous recordings, including a 1984 duet with Teddy Pendergrass. 
But with “Saving All My Love for You,” she won her first Grammy, for best female pop vocal performance, an award she would win twice more.
Her popularity soared for the next decade.  Her second album, “Whitney,” in 1987, became the first album by a woman to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1, and it included four No. 1 singles. 
She shifted her pop slightly toward R & B on her third album, “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” in 1990, which had two more No. 1 singles.
For much of the 1990's, she turned to acting, bolstered by her music.
She played a pop diva in “The Bodyguard,” and its soundtrack album--including the hits, “I Will Always Love You,” “I’m Every Woman,” “I Have Nothing” and “Run to You”--went on to sell 17 million copies in the United States. 
It won the Grammy for album of the year, and “I Will Always Love You” won record of the year (for a single).
After making the films “Waiting To Exhale” in 1995 and “The Preacher’s Wife” in 1996--which gave her the occasion to make a gospel album--Miss Houston resumed her pop career with “My Love Is Your Love” in 1998.
Miss Houston married Mr. Brown in 1992, and in 1993, they had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who survives her, as does her mother.
Miss Houston’s 2009 interview with Miss Winfrey portrayed the marriage as passionate and then turbulent, marred by drug use and by Mr. Brown’s professional jealousy, psychological abuse and physical confrontations.  They divorced in 2007. 
“I think somewhere inside, something happens to a man when a woman has that much control or has that much fame,” Miss Houston said in 2009.
Her albums in the 2000's presented a tougher, angrier side.
“Just Whitney,” in 2002, was defensive and scrappy, lashing out at the media and insisting on her loyalty to her man. 
Her most recent studio album, “I Look to You,” appeared in 2009, and it, too, reached No. 1.  The album included a hard-headed breakup song, “Salute,” and a hymnlike anthem, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.” 
Miss Houston sang, “I crashed down and I tumbled, but I did not crumble/I got through all the pain.” 
Her voice did not hide its scars.
Neil R. Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Grammys, called her “one of the world’s greatest pop singers of all time, and said, “A light has been dimmed in our music community today.”
Lieut. Mark Rosen, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department, said that emergency workers responded to a 911 call from security at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Wilshire Boulevard saying that Miss Houston was unconscious in her fourth-floor suite. 
He said that some fire department personnel were already on the scene to help prepare for a pre-Grammy party.
“There were no obvious signs of foul play,” he said.  The reality is she was too far too young to die, and any time you have to death of someone this age it is the subject of an investigation.”
Miss Houston arrived at the hotel with what Lieut. Rosen described as an entourage of friends and family, some of whom were in the hotel suite at the time. 
Outside Mr. Davis’ party, at which Miss Houston was a regular guest and performer, tourists shot cellphone pictures of a police crime laboratory van parked outside. 
But inside the glamour of the event seemed undiminished, even if Miss Houston’s name was on everyone’s lips.
The streets in front of the Beverly Hilton, already crowded because of the Grammy Awards party, swarmed with fans, drawn by the news of this latest death of a high-profile pop star.
“I was in utter, total disbelief,” said one of them, Lavetris Singleton.  “Who was not a fan of Whitney Houston at some point?”
“I want to show support because she inspired a lot of people and nobody’s perfect,” she said.  “But if we’re not out here, then she’ll be forgotten.  We are her legacy.”