Dionne Warwick has decades of pop hits. Six Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award. More than 100 million records sold.

But before the New Jersey legend was a guest on “Finding Your Roots,” she didn’t know the specific circumstances that brought her musical family from the South to Newark.

Warwick, 83, unearths more than 200 years of her family tree with the help of host Henry Louis Gates Jr. in an upcoming episode of the PBS series.

Gates explores the ancestry of Warwick and Oscar nominee Danielle Brooks (”The Color Purple”) in the episode, which airs Feb. 13 (title: “The Brick Wall Falls”).

They both came to him facing “one of the greatest of all genealogical challenges — reconnecting roots that have been severed by slavery,” he says in the show.

Warwick, who lives in South Orange, recounts for Gates how she sang in public for the first time as a child, in front of her grandfather Elzae Warrick’s congregation at St. Luke’s AME Church in Newark.

She was nervous and didn’t want to perform, but she did, with his encouragement.

“I closed my eyes as tight as I could get them and I started singing ‘Jesus Loves Me,’” Warwick tells Gates.

“It was my first standing ovation.”

Long before Warwick was crowned Queen of Twitter, the music icon, who started out as a background singer, created music magic with songwriter Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David. She became a highly successful artist who “bridged the gap” across pop and R&B to reach both Black and white audiences.

“Music is the medicine that cures everything,” Warwick tells Gates in the show. “I truly believe that.”

The singer, who was recently feted at the Kennedy Center Honors, broke out with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962. (A 2021 documentary about Warwick is titled “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over.”)

She tells the story of hearing the song on the radio for the first time. She was driving back from Newark Airport, where she had dropped off some friends.

When she heard her name, she turned the volume up, rolled the windows down and pulled over.

“It was unbelievable,” she tells Gates.

Warwick was born Dionne Warrick in East Orange and only became known as Dionne Warwick because of a misspelling on the cover of that first record.

“I hated it,” she says of the error.

When her grandfather saw she was upset about the mistake, he recommended she use Warwick as her stage name.

An ‘ugly man’ and an inherited strength

Gates explains that the show’s researchers hit a brick wall with one part of Warrick’s ancestry.

They were unable to illuminate her grandfather’s family tree because of the way slavery obscures such connections.

But they were able to find a way through her grandmother Juanita “Neatie” Holland, who was born in Florida in 1892.

Holland’s grandparents, Guy Russ and Mary Ann Russ, Warwick’s great-great-grandparents, were born in 1814 and 1841 in North Carolina and Florida.

The 1870 census shows that the Russ family lived in Jackson County, Florida with five children five years after Emancipation was proclaimed in Florida.

Researchers made a connection to an earlier document showing slave owner Joseph Russ.

While enslaved people are not named in this 1860 document, their ages and genders were recorded. One possibly matches Guy Russ, Warwick’s great-great-grandfather, then 46.

Gates asks Warwick what it’s like to see him listed this way — without a name on a slave schedule.

“It’s ugly,” Warwick says. “The only way that those that were purported to own a human being could exist was by transferring their name and I think it’s only because they couldn’t pronounce ours. That we had certain regality to our own, the names we brought with us, language that we brought with us. They could not understand how could you dare have something that we don’t have.”

Gates shares a photo of Joseph Russ, the slaveowner.

“You’re an ugly man,” Warwick says, looking at the photo.

Guy Russ would’ve been about 50 when he became a free man. He remained with his family in Jackson County, Florida despite local church leaders calling on Black residents to move due to ongoing terrorism from local white residents.

Warwick guesses correctly that her family stayed put rather than move elsewhere because of the threat.

“What I am comes directly from this,” she tells Gates. “I know I’m a strong woman. I have been strong literally from birth. I’ve never accepted certain things in my lifetime. The word ‘no’ doesn’t exist for me. The word ‘can’t’ does not exist for me. And I’m sure that that strength and the being that I am has an awful lot to do with these people who gave that to me.”

The foundation of a musical legacy

Warwick also explores the ancestry of her maternal grandfather, Nitcholas “Nitch” Drinkard.

Drinkard, who was a tenor singer, laid the foundation for his exceptionally talented family — Warwick’s aunt is singer Cissy Houston (Drinkard’s daughter, born Emily Drinkard), 90. Cissy’s daughter Whitney Houston, the showstopping global superstar who died 12 years ago this week, was Warwick’s first cousin.

“He loved to sing,” Warwick says of Drinkard in the episode. “He had a voice that was angelic and he knew his children could sing.”

Drinkard’s grandfather, Dionne’s great-great-grandfather, was John Drinkard Sr., born 1844 in Mississippi.

John owned a farm in Georgia with his wife, which was unusual for African Americans of the South in the early 1900s, a time when most were sharecroppers.

“It’s amazing,” Warwick says, looking at the deed to the land and a map of the Drinkard property, where Gates says her family likely grew cotton. “Especially during that period of time. That’s fabulous.”

By the late 1920s, they had moved to Newark.

Gates points to reports from the time about a boll weevil (beetle) infestation that wrecked Georgia’s cotton crop, which very likely could’ve been the reason why the Drinkards had to move north as part of the Great Migration.

In 1923, when Warwick’s mother, Lee Drinkard, was a young child — her mother was Delia Mae Drinkard — Nitcholas Drinkard defaulted on a bank loan and the family property was sold at auction.

Upon moving to New Jersey, Nitcholas Drinkard worked at a metal foundry and started a family gospel group, the Drinkard Jubilairs.

After Drinkard died in 1952, the family kept singing. Renamed The Drinkard Singers, they recorded the 1958 gospel album “A Joyful Noise” for RCA Records. Warwick’s mother, Lee Drinkard Warrick, managed the group. Drinkard talent can be heard on recordings from Aretha Franklin and Elvis.

At episode’s end, Warwick rolls out a large family tree provided by the show, promising to frame it immediately.

“This has been one of the most enlightening, fulfilling moments I’ve felt in a long, long time,” she says. “It’s wonderful, that’s what it is.”

The Dionne Warwick episode of “Finding Your Roots” airs 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, Feb. 13 on PBS.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup.