I am a Vocal Instructor and Coach by Training and Profession. Maybe I can shed a little light on Whitney’s voice.
What most of us LOVED about Whitney’s voice was its FLEXIBILITY. Her “Runs”, Melismas,(turns on one syllable),and Cadenzas,(Long passages based on scales and arpeggios) were breathtaking. She was able to execute them nearly flawlessly and smoothly. This was her strongest attribute.
However, her vocal placement (which controls the “color” of her voice) was inconsistent. She placed low notes in her chest and high notes in her head, which is very “Old-School”. At some point, the voice has to “break”,when going from the chest to the face, and then another break going from the face to the forehead. This is something that some people find very annoying, and is probably why some people on this thread didn’t like her voice even when she was in her prime.
Inconsistent vocal placement encourages “BELTING” which slams air on the vocal folds and invites blisters and eventually callouses called NODES. Whitney would have eventually destroyed her voice even without the cocaine, but of course, that didn’t help either.
Stevie Nicks goes under the knife frequently to have nodes removed because of her belting, from what I have been told by someone close to her in the business.
I spend hours retaining singers who have been taught this way. It is hard work saving voices.
Thanks for your analysis.
I’ve listened to Whitney over the decades and while I appreciated her range I always wondered why I’d cringe when she “belted” certain notes. It just wasn’t pretty. Not to mention overdoing those “Cadenzas”. Maybe it’s a black thing but I couldn’t appreciate it. She was always hoarse when interviewing too. No wonder.
"Six months ago I met a girl and she was taking singing lessons... and her coach, an eighty-four year-old guy-- you'd think would be the last guy in the world to be weird, but LISTEN TO THIS: he kept wanting her to SING... from her DIAPHRAGM! ...I mean that would take YEARS to learn that, wouldn't it?" - Steve Martin