US saying last good-bye to Whitney Houston.

Tuning in to a radio phone-in show on Wednesday evening, as they inched through the decaying urban sprawl where Whitney Houston was born and raised, the commuters of New Jersey were stirred by a vitriolic debate, The Daily Mail reported.

Earlier that day, state governor Chris Christie had issued a special decree, ordering the Stars and Stripes flag to be lowered on public buildings for the singer’s funeral — an honour usually afforded only to fallen servicemen and great civic figures — and the battle lines were drawn.

‘She was just a drug addict!’ stormed one former US Navy sailor, to murmurs of agreement from programme host Steve Trevelise. ‘It’s a disgrace that our society celebrates people who take the wrong path.

Doubtless a discreet veil will be drawn over this disharmony today at 5pm British time when Houston is laid to rest in a service that will be beamed live to millions around the world. She was, before her abject decline, the glittering crown-princess in a soul and gospel music dynasty that included her mother, Cissy (a backing singer to Elvis Presley, among many others) her cousin, Dionne Warwick, and godmother, Aretha Franklin. The ceremony is being billed as America’s biggest ‘black royal funeral’.

Houston’s body will be paraded through tearful streets in a golden hearse, and 1,500 invited guests, including many celebrities, will file into the New Hope Baptist church, where she sang in the choir as a child. Its redbrick walls will echo to requiems from Franklin and Stevie Wonder.

After the towering eulogies, the woman whose voice, with its three-and-a-half octave range, has been described as the greatest of all time, will be laid to rest in a cemetery 13 miles away, alongside John Houston — the father who guided her career, but with whom she fell out so irreconcilably as her life disintegrated that she did not even attend his funeral in 2003.