Whitney Houston's death changed the Grammys

As host of the 2012 Grammy Awards, LL Cool J was at home on February 11, going over material for the next night's ceremony, when he got the call that Whitney Houston had died.

After hearing that, the rapper-turned-actor told CNN Monday, there was really only one thing he could do to move forward with his duties: to open the ceremony with a prayer.

His decision and other last minute revisions to the Grammy Awards are chronicled in a documentary from the Recording Academy that details how Houston's sudden death dramatically changed music's biggest night. Called "A Death in the Family: The Show Must Go On," the documentary was screened in Los Angeles Monday.

Although the opening prayer was his idea, LL Cool J said yesterday, he still wasn't sure how to pull it off.

"I bounced it off my wife and she said, 'Yeah, I think it's great,'" he recalled. "It was just one of those things where I wasn't sure how [Grammys' executive producer] Ken [Ehrlich] was going to respond to it because I knew it was a little unorthodox, but it was the only way I could, for me, be able to do the show or handle it and feel good as a host moving forward."

And continuing on with the weekend's festivities as planned was what Houston would have wanted, Neil Portnow, President and CEO of The Recording Academy, told CNN Monday.

"Whitney would have said, 'Boys, the show has got to go on. 'It's about music, some of it is my music and that will be there forever.' And that is the voice we listened to," Portnow said. "When you have a loss in the family, family comes together. So I actually saw it as an opportunity for us all to be tighter, hold each other's hands and lean on each other's shoulders to grieve and celebrate everything Whitney was about."

More than 39 million viewers watched February's Grammys, making it the second largest audience in the ceremony's history.