She is the undisputed Queen of Disco. Her passionate voice lent a distinctive personality to her records that was often imitated but never duplicated by her fellow disco divas. She also brought new levels of intelligence and ambition to disco music by weaving her songs into concept albums. In the process, she recorded a series of singles and albums that defined and innovated the disco sound. 

As disco demised, Donna Summer found her way as an international superstar and began identifying herself as a dance music artist. Today, as Summer celebrates over 30 years in the music business, she can look back at a stunning 14 Top 10 hits, four No. 1 smash singles, and album sales in the tens of millions worldwide.

Here's her story, right from the beginning:

Donna Andrea Gaines was born on December 31, 1948, and grew up in Boston as part of a large family of five sisters and a brother. Her father, Andrew was a janitor, butcher, and electrician at various times in his life; her mother was a schoolteacher; and her strict church upbringing banned her from even wearing makeup. 

		Inspired by the gospel vocals of Mahalia Jackson, Donna took the first steps toward her singing career at the Grant AME Zion Church, where she would often lead the congregation. Lured away from the Lord by white Bostonian rock musician and influenced by Janis Joplin and the Velvet Underground, she contemplated a singing career and, as was often the case during this era, also set her starry eyes toward the Broadway stage.
Grant AME Zion Church

This ambition led her to Manhattan and an audition for the hit musical Hair as a replacement understudy for Melba Moore. Realizing she might never appear onstage unless Moore was taken ill, Donna accepted an offer to play a smaller role (singing the tune "White Boys") in the German touring version of the show bound for Munich. Because her father had been stationed in Germany during World War II and had learned the language, Donna decided to follow his lead and settle in the country herself.

Donna and crew in Haare

In 1972, while performing in Godspell, she met Helmut Sommer. The blond Viennese was a fellow struggling actor who worked part-time as a waiter at the popular Munich disco Why Not? Soon she was pregnant with her first child, Mimi, and although the couple married in 1973, they would be divorced the very next year.

While starring in Hair in Munich, Donna often did the odd studio session for extra cash. During one of these gigs she was introduced to the man who would turn out to be her Svengali and make her an international singing sensation. Producer Giorgio Moroder, owner of Oasis Records with his partner Pete Bellotte, hired her to sing on a demo disc they were preparing at Munich's Musicland Studios for the group Three Dog Night. Once they heard her voice, however, they promptly signed her up, and then searched for suitable songs to show off her talent.

A veteran force on the German music scene since 1966, with his first composition "Stop", "Bla Bla Diddly" and the 1971 hit "Son of My Father" (on which Donna sang backing vocals), the Swiss-Italian Moroder made Donna a European smash with her first three releases, "The Hostage", "Lady Of The Night" and "Virgin Mary". "The Hostage" was a number one record in Holland and Belgium, reached number two in France, and hit the Top 10 in Spain and Scandinavia. But none of these releases made any impact in America. (Read full details about "LADY OF THE NIGHT", the album, HERE)

Moroder knew their first recording geared to vital American and Britain airplay would have to be really special, and so he decided to write something evocative of the steamy nunbers that were much in vogue during the late sixties, such as the controversial Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin duet "Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus." (Donna would eventually discofy this song herself in 1978).

		The result was the playfully seductive "Love To Love You Baby", which Donna found so lyrically embarassing that she could only sing it in the dark when it was first recorded. On its initial European release, though, the single only found a buying public in Paris. But Moroder refused to give up on the cut and included it in a package of three tracks he submitted to the Los Angeles-based Neil Bogart, who was in the process of setting up a new record label named Casablanca.
Bogart

Recording industry legend has it that Susan Munao, wife of Casablanca Records' owner - Neil Bogart - slipped a certain disc onto the turntable at home during a party. It was "Love To Love You Baby", submitted by Giorgio Moroder. When it electrified the guests into an orgy of dancing, Munao kept playing the three-minute track over and over again because the partygoers complained it was too short. 

The reaction made Bogart believe that a longer record would help fill the growing need of late night dance club deejays who were desperately looking for lengthy songs to play in the discos which were now sprouting up all over the country. "It was 3 a.m.," Moroder told once. "Bogart was frantic. He wanted me to send him a 20-minute version and he wanted it as soon as humanly possible." 

Few has ever pushed a pop song beyond the eight-minute mark, but Moroder went back into the studio and, with Donna in the dark again, engineered an unheard-of-sixteen-minute-plus version of the song. What was mildly sexy in its original form became a hypnotically erotic tour de force, a magnum opus of wanton carnal abandon. Densely orchestrated and deliberately accenting rhythmic thrusts, "Love to Love You Baby" invited dancers to participate in the sexual ritual and then held dancers enthralled as it all began again. Moroder's new and expanded version of "Love To Love You Baby" clocked in at 16 minutes and 50 seconds. It had been fleshed out, embellished, and remixed, but done so in a manner which carefully avoided overshadowing Donna's original "scratch" vocal. 

Bogart came to believe so strongly in "Love To Love You Baby" that he held back the release date a full three months so that Casablanca would be better situated to deal with a major demand for the record. He also planned to totally ignore Donna's European renown as a black American R&B singer and instead introduce her to America as "The First Lady of Love," an erotic "disco artist" who was unlike any other female R&B singer of the era.
The strategy worked wonders. Four weeks after it was released in America, "Love To Love You Baby" had chalked up sales of 200,000 copies. Most of the early sales occurred in the urban markets that Bogart had targeted, but soon the edited single version crossed over onto the pop charts and climbed all the way to #2 on Billboard's Hot 100. (It was kept from the top spot by Paul Simon's "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.") It also became Donna's breakthrough hit single in Britain, reaching #4.

"Love To Love Vou Baby" also became the topic of hot debate among politicians, moralists, and the everyday person on the street. The Reverend Jesse Jackson publicly condemned the record (and others) as "morally bankrupt." In the UK, the song was banned by the BBC. The Kremlin denounced Donna and her music as an "evil influence."

The salacious buzz about Donna was larger than even she and her producers had expected. In an article entitled "Sex Rock," Time magazine ran a provocative black and white photograph of Donna, with a caption reading "a marathon of 22 orgasms." "The lyrics are stunningly simple, mostly five words repeated 28 times" Time reported. "Donna's message is best conveyed in grunts and groans and languishing moans." Even journalists believed that the record was an accurate indicator of Donna's image.

"Whenever guys would come to interview me," she told the Chicago Tribune, "it was obvious they were afraid I was going to try to jump them. Some of them were so nervous that they could barely talk and I had to interview them."

The big success of "Love To Love You Baby" proved the commercial viability of the genre to the rest of the industry because Bogart sent copies of the song to every deejay in New York's major discos. He knew that if they liked it, he'd have a crossover hit. After only one week of play in the Manhattan disco area, the shortly after released album had sold 40,000 local copies, and, appropriately, on Valentine's Day 1976, "Love to Love You Baby" hit number one on Billhoard magazine's Hot 100, where it would stay for seventeen weeks. Conceptually brilliant, "Love To Love You Baby" was a formula that would be worth repeating. That song not only pushed the limits on the dance floor; it was so often played in its full-length version on the radio that it set a precedent symptomatic of the "anything goes" spirit of the seventies". The first real rumblings of the coming disco revolution that had been bubbling undergroung were now being felt beyond the appreciative subculture.

(Biography adapted from the ones published at the books "Saturday Night Forever" by Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonem, "Donna Summer: Her Life and Music" by Josiah Howard, and "Ordinary Girl: The Journey" by Donna Summer with Marc Elliot, and also at Rolling Stone magazine, at YesterdayLand.com)