What the World Needs Now is Love

If you take a look at Whitney Houston’s family tree, and follow it back to the branch that holds her up, you’ll find Cissy Houston. Cissy, like many singers of her time, got her start in the church. Singing as part of the Drinkard Singers, a family group made up of Cissy, her sister Anne and brothers Larry and Nicky. Group changes over the years would see the Drinkards morph into The Sweet Inspirations, an in-demand vocal group that backed the likes of Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, and Elvis Presley. 

The thing about background singers is that we sometimes forget just how powerful they are, how great their voices are. We can forget how much they shape a song, how important their presence is. The record companies didn’t forget when it came to The Sweet Inspirations, though, and the group recorded their first album for Atlantic in 1967. After a detour back to gospel on their second album, the group released 1968’s What the World Needs Now is Love, an album that calls on the secular and the sacred with its pop-soul-gospel fusion. The Don Covay-penned “Watch the One Who Brings You the News,” holds both elements in equal measure. You can hear the church, the nightclub, the call-and-response, the soul. And the Cissy Houston original “Where Did It Go,” with its driving organ, teams those familiar gospel sounds with heartbreaking lyrics of lost love. 

On their own, The Sweet Inspirations never really burned up the charts. There were a few charting singles, but their background work was what really kept them busy. As Joe McEwen wrote of the group in Rolling Stone in 1978, “the promise of the group was never borne out.” Cissy would leave the group in 1970, heading for solo and session work, and The Sweet Inspirations, McEwan notes, were seen as “simply Aretha Franklin’s backup vocalists.” This album should prove that they were always more than that.