Whitney Houston, RIP

I was intending to write something about Whitney Houston, who was laid to rest yesterday, but I found that basically everything I wanted to say had already been said, much of it in this here post by Jim Bartlett, who covers Whitney's chart domination about the same way I would have. Perhaps the best tribute to the power of Whitney's voice was that she took "The Star-Spangled Banner" into the pop Top Twenty in 1991 - then took the same recording into the Top Ten in 2001. (That was her last Top Forty hit, by the way.) It is as if someone had a massive hit with "Happy Birthday," and I don't mean by covering Altered Images.

Then our own Joe Levy (whom you may have seen as part of CNN's team coverage of Whitney's funeral yesterday) wrote this magnificent appreciation of "I Will Always Love You," which he calls "almost like a historical tour of American singing." Plus, he made me pause and figure out if I knew what "caesura" meant. So really, there's nothing left for me to say.