But one of the best things that happened in 1967 came after an appearance we made at the Apollo Theater.
We were singing background for Tommy Hunt, whose song “Human” had been a big hit, and sitting up in the balcony was a sixteen-year-old boy playing hooky from school. A legendary place in the music world, the Apollo used to have five or six shows a day, particularly on Wednesdays when the amateur show would take place. Each of their shows had about five or six acts or artists, who would play three or four songs apiece until the headliner would do a whole forty-minute set. This teenage boy playing hooky happened to arrive at the Apollo just in time to see the Sweets come out onstage in our flowing yellow chiffon gowns. When he heard us sing, he decided he had to somehow get backstage to talk with us.
And that’s how we met Luther Vandross. He walked right up to me backstage and said, “You all are the best singers I’ve ever heard!” I was sucking on a piece of candy to soothe my throat, so I took it out and said, “Thank you, baby.” That moment marked the beginning of a beautiful, close friendship. Luther was just a high school kid then, but he would end up working with Nippy and me as a backup singer when Nippy was a teenager. Later, after he became a star himself, Luther always insisted that the Sweet Inspirations sing background for him whenever we were available.
That was the thing about the Sweet Inspirations—we were known throughout the industry for great work. Everybody was trying to make a hit record, and a lot of times, the background was what put a record over the top and made it a hit. We always tried to make the background memorable, to make it something that people would sing along to when they heard the song. And we were professionals: We always got to a session on time, and we finished in the allotted time. We were the baddest four girls in town, out of town, all over town!
So, 1967 was a great year in many ways—but it brought some frightening times, too.
One night, while I was in Las Vegas on tour with Aretha, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I could just feel that something was wrong back home. It was very late in Newark, but I called anyway. John answered the phone, and right away I said, “What’s wrong with my baby?” Meaning Nippy, who was then four years old.
“Nothing’s wrong,” John said. But I could tell by his voice he was lying.
“You better put her on the phone right now,” I told him. I wasn’t messing around.
I could hear his muffled voice saying something to her, and then she got on the phone. “Hi, Mommy,” she said, her voice quiet and raspy and her diction funny. Something was very wrong—the child could hardly talk!
“Nippy!” I said. “What is wrong with you? What happened?”
“Nothing, Mommy,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“Put your daddy back on the phone, baby,” I said, trying to control my temper. If I was going to yell at anyone, it wasn’t her. It was my husband, for letting who-knows-what happen to my little girl while I was two thousand miles away.
When John got on the phone, I snapped, “You better tell me right now what the hell happened to Nippy!”
He sighed. “She’s all right, Cissy. She just fell down, you know? She’s fine.” But when he told me the details, I wanted to kill him. It seems that Nippy had been playing with Michael, running around the house and acting silly like they usually did. But for some reason, she’d stuck a wire coat hanger in her mouth. When her father yelled, “Stop that running!” she did—but she fell down and the hook of that hanger rammed right back toward her throat.
She screamed and yanked it out, and blood just started gushing out of her mouth. She ran to her daddy, and when John looked into her mouth he saw a nasty gash far back in her throat.
John drove her to the emergency room at nearby Beth Israel Hospital, and the doctors told him she was lucky—the hook had just missed piercing her vocal cords. He held Nippy while they stitched up her wound and filled her mouth with surgical packing, and they’d just gotten home from the emergency room when I had that bad feeling and called home.
John apologized for not being more careful, but even though I knew there wasn’t much he could do to slow those kids down, I couldn’t help myself—I was so mad, and being that far away from my baby, I felt helpless. I couldn’t just leave the Sweets and come home, but for the rest of that tour with Aretha, I called home even more often than I had before. When I finally got back, Nippy’s stitches were out and she sounded normal again. I remember thanking God and thinking that Nippy’s escape from more serious injury had been a miracle.
And 1967 brought frightening times not just to our family, but to the entire city of Newark, too. Drugs were spreading everywhere, even creeping into our cozy little village on Wainwright. The city was tense from the rise in crime and frustration with a civil rights movement that was moving a little too slowly and deliberately. In July, that tension exploded in seven days of violent rioting and looting that made national news.
Our home wasn’t in the center of it, but we were close enough to smell the smoke, see the flames soaring above the Central Ward, and hear the pop-pop-pop of gunshots. At night we could hear footsteps of people running along the cobblestone streets, and the sound of gunfire. Our neighborhood no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children.
After the riots, John and I started thinking about leaving Newark, but we knew that buying a new home would cost money that we just didn’t have. I was stuck in a frustrating cycle—I was the family’s main breadwinner, so despite wanting to spend more time with my children, I had to stay on the road. Atlantic kept recording the Sweets and trying to promote us, but they really wanted us to tour to promote the music. Our family needed the money, so I kept on working and touring. But I really wasn’t happy about it.
And the touring itself had its ups and downs, too. For our road trips, Atlantic supplied us with a car because I didn’t like riding on the bus with the rest of the crew—I never could stand the smell of marijuana and didn’t want to be around it. Sometimes, if we could get our friend Phyllis Hardaway to take care of the kids, John would come drive the car and help manage the Sweets. During those times, we toured together all across America, mostly in the South and in Texas.
This was the South of the late 1960s, and we faced racism on the road at just about every turn. Black people often couldn’t find places to stay, and even when we did, the people in the hotels were sometimes flat-out nasty to us. We had some close calls as we traveled through the South—just trying to get something to eat in one of those Jim Crow restaurants could lead to trouble. And forget about calling the police, because they were often just as hostile to us as everybody else.
Once, after we played a show in Texas, the two-bit, racist promoter didn’t want to pay us the money we were owed. John started arguing with him—actually, all the Sweets did, because we were women who didn’t take any stuff. Our pianist, Bernie, also carried a gun for extra protection, although it didn’t have a firing pin, so it was probably more likely to get us into trouble than to get us out of it. Bernie was quick to wave that thing around, though, and with what I’ll call a little aggressive coaxing, we managed to convince that promoter that he should pay us our money. And he did.
It wasn’t all rough times on the road, though—we had a lot of fun, too. I loved all the Sweets—Sylvia, Myrna, and Estelle—and John was a good addition, as he liked to cut up and joke around with everyone. We’d laugh at Bernie, who in addition to playing the piano and waving his gun around was also the wardrobe man, because he always managed to leave something important behind. We’d be getting ready for a show, and Sylvia would yell, “Bernie, where’s my hairpiece?” and he’d just shrug. She’d tell him off using some choice words, and we’d all laugh so hard.
One night, a girl named Deirdre was filling in for Myrna. We were performing in these beautiful beaded shrimp-colored gowns, and as we were on stage, singing our hearts out, I happened to look down at Deidre’s feet. Beneath the hem of that gorgeous