Anita Pointer and her sisters dressed like Greta Garbo or Bette Davis in a 1940s movie and sang like a cross between a gospel choir and the Andrews Sisters. They won a Grammy award as best country group, recorded jazz tunes by Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie and had an R&B hit with the sassy, strutting funk of Yes We Can Can.
Later they became a mainstream pop-rock act whose hits included the Bruce Springsteen-penned Fire and Neutron Dance, which featured in the film Beverly Hills Cop.
In short, the Pointer Sisters could “sing the hell out of anything”, as Anita once put it.
Trained in church, the quartet sang stacked harmonies that were perfectly matched, for all four sisters had distinctively different voices. Ruth’s low register was the foundation, sister Bonnie’s voice had a brassy tone, the youngest sister June had a soaring falsetto and Anita’s voice was sweet and sultry, although it was later to take on a huskier timbre.
As soon as the sisters heard a song “we used to always know what the other one was going to sing”, according to Ruth, the sole surviving member of the original quartet. With four such strong voices, the only argument was over who should take the lead, the cause of occasional outbreaks of sibling rivalry, which contributed to Bonnie’s decision to depart for a solo career in the late 1970s.
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At the time June was also sidelined due to a lifelong struggle with drug addiction and it appeared that the Pointer Sisters had reached the end of the line. However, Anita and Ruth coaxed June into rejoining them and the sisters went on to achieve their greatest commercial success as a trio.
In the end, Anita sang with the group for 46 years until forced to retire for health reasons, her equilibrium thrown out of kilter by personal tragedy. In the space of half a dozen years at the start of the millennium, she lost her mother, followed by her daughter Jada who died of cancer in 2003 and, three years later, June, also to cancer.
Following the death of her daughter — the inspiration for the 1973 Pointer Sisters song Jada — Anita was left to bring up Jada’s daughter Roxie, but a few years later was herself diagnosed with cancer. While Anita was undergoing treatment, her sister Bonnie, whose solo career never really ignited and who died in 2020 of a heart attack brought on by alcoholism, made unwelcome headlines when she was arrested for possessing crack cocaine.
However, by 2013 and in remission after chemotherapy, Anita was ready to rejoin Ruth on stage in a new line-up of the Pointer Sisters with Ruth’s daughter Issa and granddaughter Sadako.
Sadly her return to the fold did not last long. One night in 2015 when the Pointer Sisters were singing at a jazz festival in Curacao she found herself gasping for breath in the middle of the band’s hit I’m So Excited, on which she sang the lead. Unable to finish the song she suffered a panic attack and was admitted to hospital.
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“I was pushing so hard to try and be happy, to try and make other people happy, and I was killing myself. I was undernourished, dehydrated and had high blood pressure,” she said. “I had to finally accept the fact I was getting older and I had been through so many tragedies that I had to stop.”
Spending several months in bed and undergoing therapy, she was particularly racked by feelings of guilt that she had put her career over the needs of her only daughter. Having given birth in 1966 when she was 18, she had brought up Jada as a single mother after her first marriage to David Harper ended in divorce. However, the Pointer Sisters’ busy schedule meant she was often absent for weeks at a time, leaving the girl in the care of her own mother.
“I remember her crying and saying, ‘Mama please don’t go’,” she told Daily Mail TV in an interview in 2019. “But I had to pay the bills and work. I did love what I did, but I lost out on so much of her life. It has put me in a place where I will be suffering for the rest of my life because I will never get over this.”
A second marriage to Richard González in the 1980s also ended in divorce. After her breakdown she never resumed singing and eventually the cancer returned.
Away from music she had a passionate interest in African-American history and amassed a notable collection of artefacts covering the eras of slavery, segregation and civil rights. Her interest was born of visits to her grandparents in Prescott, Arkansas, where she spent a year at school when she was ten and the bitter reality of black history was “brought to life by only being allowed to sit in the balcony of the movie theatre and picking up food from the back door of the restaurant because you can’t go inside”. She later purchased the land in Arkansas on which her grandfather had built the family’s homestead.
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In an interview with the magazine Collector’s Weekly she noted that her private museum reminded her that “everybody don’t love you and that you have to prove them wrong . . . artists tried to depict black people in an insulting way, but I think big lips and big booties are beautiful”.
Anita Marie Pointer was born in 1948, in Oakland, California, the third of four sisters. She also had two older brothers and the six Pointer children sang at the West Oakland Church of God, where their father, the Rev Elton Pointer and mother, Sarah (née Silas) were ministers.
If gospel music was the order of the day they discovered Elvis Presley and rock’n’roll “every night that we could get a chance to control the radio, when Mama wasn’t home”.
She graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1965, married at 17 and took a job as a legal secretary. Ruth was also married and raising a family but Bonnie and June were singing as a duo, under the name Pointers — A Pair. One night in 1969 Anita asked her mother to babysit and went to see them perform. “I just lost it,” she recalled. “I sat in that audience and I cried and sang along. The next day, I quit my job. I said, ‘I’ve got to sing!’ ”
The first incarnation of the Pointer Sisters was born and in 1971 they were signed as a trio by Atlantic Records. It was a false start and they were dropped after two singles. They moved to the Blue Thumb label and their debut album appeared in 1973, by which time they had been joined by Ruth. Their first big hit came that same year with Yes We Can Can, a song they sang with a sense of joyous liberation because growing up in a religious household their youth had been dominated by “no you can’t” — as in “no jewellery, no make-up, no dancing, no movies and certainly no rock music”, Ruth explained.
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Dressed in glamourous 1940s costumes scavenged from the attics of their parents’ friends, they cut a striking image, although the delicate and ageing silk and chiffon tended to tear easily as they danced on stage. It meant that the first port of call on hitting a new town on tour became the local thrift store in search of replacement garments.
An unlikely hit came in 1974 with Fairytale, a country song written by Anita and Bonnie and which Elvis Presley later covered. It won them a Grammy and led to an invitation to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where few realised they were a black group until they took the stage.
Afterwards a party was thrown in their honour, at which they were mistaken for domestic staff and ushered into the kitchen. An appearance in the 1976 film Car Wash with Richard Pryor raised their profile further, only for the group’s future to be thrown into doubt by Bonnie’s departure the next year.
They bounced back with a new image that ditched the retro look and an updated, contemporary sound, courtesy of the Los Angeles producer Richard Perry, famous for helming hits for Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand and Harry Nilsson among others.
The sisters spent a decade working with Perry and during their high tide between 1978 and 1984 racked up seven Top 10 singles, starting with Fire, on which Anita sang lead, and ending with Neutron Dance, written by Allee Willis (obituary, December 31, 2019).
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In between came He’s So Shy, Automatic, Slow Hand, Jump (For My Love) and I’m So Excited.
Several of them made No 2 or 3 in the Billboard chart but the Pointer Sisters’ only outright chart-topper came when they sang alongside Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Tina Turner and countless others on the 1985 charity No 1 We Are The World.
After the song had been recorded, Anita asked every one of the stars to autograph her copy of the sheet music and had it framed to hang alongside the gold and platinum discs at her home in Beverly Hills.
Anita Pointer, singer, was born on January 23, 1948. She died of cancer on December 31, 2022, aged 74