Based on the first 10 years of this blog, you wouldn’t even know the singer Cissy Houston existed. She didn’t pop up, even tangentially, during hundreds of posts. But beginning earlier this year she’s suddenly like the Kevin Bacon of music — six degrees of separation from everyone.

“Cajun Moon” is credited to Herbie Mann, who I’m familiar with only as a jazz flautist. So upon running across this title I simply assumed it was an instrumental version of a song originally written and recorded by J.J. Cale (Cale is the 70’s version of J.D. Loudermilk — he steadily released albums with no hits while other artists found great success by covering him, particularly Eric Clapton with “After Midnight” and “Cocaine”). Hearing the track had a vocal, I just figured it was an anonymous professional studio singer.

I was half right. Because of course it turned out to be Cissy Houston.

Cissy started out singing in a popular gospel group for a couple of decades before forming an all-female vocal trio in the early 60’s called The Sweet Inspirations. They provided backing vocals for everyone from Aretha Franklin to Jimi Hendrix to Van Morrison and then joined Elvis Presley for his run of shows in Las Vegas in 1969. The following year, Houston retired from the group to focus on her children (Whitney!) and concentrate on studio recording. Her solo career never achieved mainstream success but she maintained a parallel career continuing to sing backup for artists like Paul Simon and Bette Midler.

In the 1970’s, Herbie Mann started to incorporate heavy doses of soul, reggae, and disco into his music after spending the previous decade making records full of instrumental pop, bossa nova, and straightforward jazz. In 1975, he teamed up with Houston to record a couple of disco tracks, and the collaboration continued in 1976 with the easygoing, bluesy funk of “Cajun Moon.” You’d never guess Mann played the flute based on the edited version released as a single, but the twice-as-long album version has a lot more woodwind action. The track also features David “Fathead” Newman (from Ray Charles) on saxophone, Tony Levin (soon to join Peter Gabriel and King Crimson) on bass, and Steve Gadd (from everything) on drums.

I’ve mentioned Cissy Houston a couple of times this year (and we’ll surely run across her again at this rate); now let’s hear her do her thing. If you just want the Cissy-centric single:

If you want the extended musical version with extra flute and sax solos: