She had the most unique voice that defined an era of music. Her songs were symbol of amazing passionate nights of romance and love. At some of her concerts, people in the audience would wear symbols of that era on their ears and around their necks. Her music garnered her many awards and her songs have stood the test of time. She started her amazing journey in the church and it led her to superstardom across the world. This past week however, this legendary artist that defined an era had her “Last Dance.”
This past Thursday, Donna Summer, the five-time Grammy Award winner and woman who defined the era of Disco passed away from lung cancer at her home in Naples, FL. She was 63 years old.
Summer had been diagnosed as having lung cancer despite reports of being a non-smoker. The cancer was in no relation to smoking.
She is survived by her husband of 32 years to Brooklyn Dreams member Bruce Sudano and her three children Mimi Sommer, who she had with ex-husband Helmuth Sommer, Brooklyn Sudano and Amanda Sudano.
In a statement from the Summer family, “While we grieve her passing, we are at piece celebrating her extraordinary life and legacy.”
Many in the music industry expressed their feelings about Summer’s passing on Thursday.
Via Twitter Kylie Minogue said that Summer was “one of my earliest musical inspirations. R.I.P. Donna Summer #BadGirlsForEver.”
Quincy Jones said of Summer, “Your voice was the heartbeat and soundtrack of a decade.”
“Few singers have impacted music & the world like Donna Summer! It is the end of an era.”
To fully understand the kind of career Donna Summer had and what made her one of the very best to hear these two facts.
She was the first artist to have three straight double albums reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart as well as chart four No. 1 singles in the country within a span of 13 months. She also had 19 No. 1 dance hits over her legendary career.
Summer, whose real name is LaDonna Adrian Gaines was born on Dec. 31, 1948 in Boston, MA to Andrew Gaines a butcher and his wife Mary, who was a schoolteacher. She was one of seven children raised in a Boston’s Dorchester. The family lived on the first floor of a three-decker home.
Mary recalls that from the first time her daughter could speak, she loved to sing. She would often go through the house singing. So much so that she sang for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Summer first performance came at age 10 when she replaced a vocalist who failed to show up.
“I opened up my mouth and this voice just shot out of me. It shocked me and it shocked everyone in the room and I started crying and everyone in the room started crying,” Summer said once about that moment.
“I heard the voice of God saying to me you got to be famous. This is your power and your never to abuse this power.”
She used that power to become a popular figure in performing in school musicals at Boston’s Jeremiah e. Burke High School.
In 1967 just weeks before her graduation, Summer left for New York where she became a member of the blues-rock band Crow. The group unfortunately did not get signed to a record label and they broke up.
Summer stayed in New York and auditioned for a role in the counterculture musical Hair. She agreed to take the role in the Munich, Germany production of the show and moved there after getting the blessing of her parents.
Four years later she released her first single, a cover of The Jaynetts’ “Sally Go ‘Round the Roses,” from one-off European deal with Decca Records.
In 1975, Summer was approached by legendary music producer Giorgio Moroder with the idea for a song that she and Pete Bellotte were working on for another singer. She had come up with the lyric, “love to love you, baby.”
Summer said that she wanted her voice to sound like Marilyn Monroe cooing the words.
To get into the mood of recording the song, she requested that Moroder turn the lights off while they sat on a sofa with inducing her moans and groans.
After hearing the playback of the song, Moroder felt that Summer’s song should be released.
The song was sent to Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart in hopes of getting it released in the U.S. He informed Summer and Moroder that he would release the song, but he requested that it needed to be a longer version with discotheques. They returned with a 17 minute version and Summer was signed and the song was released in November of 1975. The shorter version of the “Love To Love You Baby” was promoted to radio stations while clubs regularly played the longer version.
By early 1976 “Love To Love You Baby” had reached No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
Two years later Summer acted in the film Thank God It’s Friday, playing a singer determined to perform in at a hot disco club. The film had modest success, but the song from the film, “Last Dance” reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and resulted in Summer winning her first of five Grammy awards. The writer of the song Paul Jabara won an Academy Award for the composition.
“A lot of clubs had disco balls and being sort of ‘The Queen of Disco,’ made me that synonymous sort of with me and people would come to the show with disco ball earrings and disco ball necklaces,” Summer once said.
Summer followed with the album Bad Girls. The album was so successful that it spawned the number one hits “Hot Stuff” and title track and the number two “Dim All the Lights,” With the songs “MacArthur Park,” “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls” and the duet with Barbara Streisand “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” Summer achieved four No. 1 hits in a 13-month span.
"I loved doing the duet with her. She had an amazing voice and was so talented,” Streisand said last Thursday.
In 1979 Summer released On the Radio; Greatest Hits Volume I & II, her first (international) greatest album. It reached No. 1 in the U.S. becoming her third straight No. 1 album. The new song from the compilation, “On the Radio,” reached the top in the U.S. selling over a million copies in the states alone.
Wanting to branch out from disco, Summer signed with Geffen Records, a new label started by David Geffen and her first album released was The Wanderer. The album which had more of the burgeoning New Wave sound and some elements of rock achieved gold status in the U.S. and the title track, which was released as the first single peaked at No. 3 in the U.S. but subsequent singles only became moderate hits.
Summer’s second Geffen release I’m a Rainbow was shelved by the label, although two of the album’s songs would be on soundtracks of the films Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Flashdance.
After parting ways with Moroder after seven years of working together, Geffen recruited super music producer Quincy Jones to produce Summer’s 1982 album Donna Summer. The album’s single “Love is in Control (Finger on the Trigger) was an top 10 hit on the American Hot 100, followed by moderate hits “State of Independence,” which reached No. 41 on the pop charts and “The Woman in Me,” which was at No. 33.
Her landmark album of the decade came in 1983 when she delivered the album She Works Hard for the Money, which Polygram Records released on its Mercury imprint. The title song reached No. 3 on the U.S. Hot 100 and would provide Summer with a Grammy nomination.
You would think with the talent and ability that Summer has that the title song from this album came out of thin air, but it actually came from the most inopportune place.
“I was at the Grammy’s Party and I went to the ladies room and on my way in I saw the bathroom attendant and my first thought was she works hard for the money and I ran in the room and I got my manager and we back into the bathroom, got some toilet paper and we wrote ‘She Works Hard for the Money,’ and started writing the concept on a piece of toilet paper.”
I guess sometimes the best inspirations come from in the simplest forms and they turn into anthems.
This anthem has stood the test of time so much so that in my exercise class that I attend on Tuesdays and Thursday in the fall and spring the last two years when we jog that song is played most of the time.
In the years that followed Summer would continue to create solid music like the compilation The Best of Donna Summer, which was released on Warner Bros. Records (1990); a new jack swing style album Mistaken Identity (1991); The Donna Summer Anthology (1993); a gospel-influenced Christmas album entitled Christmas Spirit (1994) that included classic songs like “O Holy Night,” “Joy To The World“ and “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
Along with her album in 1994, Summer was offered a guest role on the sitcom Family Matters, which was on ABC at the time. She played the role of Steve Urkel’s (Jaleel White) Aunt Oona. She made a second appearance on the show in 1997
In 1998, Summer received a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording for the remixed version of her 1992 collaboration with Moroder, “Carry On,” which was released one year ago.
In 1999 Summer taped a live special for VH1 titled Donna Summer-Live and More Encore. It produced the second highest rating that year for the network, after their annual Divas special. Epic Records produced a CD of the event and the two featured studio recordings, “I Will Go with You (Con te partiro)” and “Love Is The Healer” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Dance Charts.
In 2004 Summer was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame alongside the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb. Her classic song “I Feel Love” was also inducted that night.
Four years ago Summer released her first studio album of full original material entitled Crayons, which was released on the Sony BMG label Burgundy Records. The album peaked at No. 17 on the US Top 200 Album Chart, which was Summer’s highest placing since 1983. The album itself achieved modest international success and the songs “I’m a Fire,” “Stamp Your Feet” and “Fame (The Game)” reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Dance Chart.
On Dec. 11, 2009 backed by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Summer performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway in honor of our U.S. President Barack Obama. One of the songs she performed was the classic “Last Dance.”
While on the stage or in the studio Summer seemed she could never do anything wrong, that was not always the case.
At the height of her success in the 1970s, Summer suffered through anxiety and depression.
“The more successful I became, the less I slept and it just kept getting worse and worse to the point that I just felt like I was never really awake or never really sleeping. Like I was dreaming all the time,” she told Entertainment Tonight (ET) back in 2003.
She also told ET that on one occasion in New York she was so out of it that she wanted to commit suicide. She was going to fall out from a window. Her foot got caught on the curtain of the window and just before she was about to fall the made came into the room and saved her.
“Thank God that lady came because I’d be gone today,” Summer said about that moment.
For a two-year period she was on medication. She was able to get off of it and never went back.
Summer addressed all of this in her 2003 memoir “Ordinary Girl The Journey.”
She told back then current WCBS entertainment reporter Katie McGee, “I’m a very private person by nature and so just talking about all of that stuff wasn’t easy, but I think that part of the reason for writing the book I just wanted it to be like a mirror. A reflection to them that they can see their own lives in my life and different things that I’ve been through. Maybe their going through and they know they can overcome it and they can go on.”
In the mid 1980s she was embroiled in controversy having allegedly making anti-gay remarks regarding the then relatively new disease AIDS. Summer, who by then had become a born-again Christian was alleged to have said that AIDS God’s way of punishing the lifestyle of homosexuals.
Summer denies ever making such s comment and in a letter that she wrote to the AIDS campaign group ACT UP in 1989, she said that it was “A terrible misunderstanding. I was unknowingly protected by those around me from the bad press and hate letters… If I caused you pain forgive me.”
In that same year, she also told The Advocate magazine that “A couple of the people that I write with are gay, and they have been ever since I met them. What people want to do with their bodies is their personal preference.”
She was “The Queen of Disco” who gave us songs that made us feel good and made us groove unlike any other. Her style and how she performed were second to none. She showed individuality and allure while at the same time showing off a unique voice that touch all those that watched her.
“Her music sounds as good as it ever did,” Sir Elton John said last Thursday.
Information and quotations are courtesy of 5/17/12 4 p.m. edition of WABC’s “Eyewitness News First at 4” with David Navarro and Liz Cho, report from Entertainment reporter Sandy Kenyon; 5/17/12 5 p.m. edition of WABC’s “Eyewitness News at 5” with Diana Williams and Sade Baderinwa, report from Entertainment reporter Sandy Kenyon; 5/17/12 6 p.m. edition of WCBS “2 News at 6” with Chris Wragge and Dana Tyler, report from Entertainment reporter Katie McGee; 5/17/12 6:30 p.m. edition of ABC “World News” with Diane Sawyer, report from David Wright; 5/18/12 7:30 p.m. edition of “Entertainment Tonight” with Mark Steines and Nancy O’Dell on WCBS; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Summer.
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