Cissy Houston, a two-time Grammy winner, a backup singer for Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, and the mother of the late Whitney Houston, has died. She was 91. Her family said in a statement that she was in hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease.

Houston’s contribution to gospel music and her work with the Sweet Inspirations are the stuff of legend. The R&B group is responsible for the “sha-la-las” on Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and the “chain chain chain” on Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools.

She will be remembered most for discouraging her daughter Whitney from joining show business and ultimately helping start her career. “I didn’t want her in the business,” she said in 1995. “I had seen what it could do to you, how people are ready to hurt you.” Nonetheless, she cultivated her daughter’s talent by taking her to sing at their Baptist church in Newark and using her in both studio sessions and club shows in New York while Whitney was still a teen. The two of them offered background vocals to Chaka Khan’s 1980 album Naughty when Whitney was just 16.

For the gospel singer, it was not an easy task being the matriarch of a family of singing giants. Her nieces are Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and had as cousin, the opera star Leontyne Price. She had to endure not only the death of her daughter, who drowned in a hotel bathtub in 2012, her granddaughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, faced a similar tragedy in 2015.

“I’m still so angry — at Nippy (Whitney’s nickname), at the world, at myself,” Cissy Houston wrote in the book Remembering Whitney (2013).“There are days when the questions just consume me … Was I a good mother? Was I too hard on her? And the worst one of all — could I have saved her somehow?”

Born in Newark on September 30, 1933, her crowning glory was the group she was a part of — Sweet Inspirations, which changed the business of background singing “because it was unique, and I made up all the backgrounds”.

As a member of the group, she also provided background vocals for Otis Redding and Dionne Warwick and recorded backing vocals on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Burning of the Midnight Lamp, and Aretha Franklin’s Ain’t No Way.

After decades as a session singer, she returned to her gospel roots in the 1990s. Her soul gospel albums Face to Face and He Leadeth Me earned her Grammy Awards in 1997 and 1998, respectively.