Donna Summer dies at age 63

Donna Summer, who grooved her way into the glare of disco’s strobe lights in the mid-1970s, becoming a disco died May 17 in Naples at age 63, the Washington Post reported.


With hits such as “Love to Love You Baby,” “I Feel Love,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls,” Summer came to embody disco’s sexually liberated culture. She sold more than 20 million records and became one of the first performers to have three consecutive double-disc albums reach No. 1 on the charts.


For her dominance of 1970s pop, Summer was dubbed the Queen of Disco. But she bristled at the moniker’s narrow scope. “It’s nice to be the queen of something,” she told the New York Times in 1996, adding, “They can call me what they want as long as they pay me.”


Trained initially in gospel singing, she had a remarkable range and accumulated five Grammy Awards for singing rock, rhythm and blues, gospel and dance music. She co-wrote many of her hip-gyrating disco tunes.


In a 1984 assessment of her career, Times pop music critic Robert Palmer wrote that Ms. Summer “made some of the freshest, most substantial dance records of a period noted for its froth and foolishness.”


Summer launched her professional career in the late 1960s by moving to Europe to sing in a production of the rock musical “Hair.” She spent eight years overseas performing in stagings of “Godspell” and “Porgy and Bess” and eventually met producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte.


She had minor success in Europe during the early 1970s singing “The Hostage” and “Lady of the Night” before exploding to stardom with the 17-minute opus “Love to Love You Baby.” The song was a disco rendition of the 1960s Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin erotic duet “Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus”.

 
She found greater success with the 1978 album “Live and More,” which featured her singing concert versions of “MacArthur Park,” popularized by actor Richard Harris, and “Last Dance.”


Ms. Summer’s 1979 album “Bad Girls” hit No. 1 on the Billboard top 200, powered by hits including “Hot Stuff” and the catchy, horn-infused “Bad Girls.”


Summer’s lasting popularity was buoyed by legions of black, Latin and gay fans. Her electrifying performances were known to draw sellout crowds.


Amid Ms. Summer’s success in the late 1970s, she suffered from depression and attempted suicide. She wrote in her 2003 memoir that she climbed onto the windowsill of her Central Park hotel room. As she leaned out, her foot got caught in the drapes, preventing her fall. She became a born-again Christian by the mid-1980s, and many of her later songs had religious themes.