On this day in 2012, singer and songwriter Donna Summer, who rose to fame during the 1970s with such disco anthems as \u201cLove to Love You Baby\u201d and \u201cHot Stuff,\u201d dies at age 63 in Naples, Florida, after battling cancer. Also known for such 1980s hits as \u201cShe Works Hard for the Money,\u201d the five-time Grammy Award winner influenced scores of other artists with her music, which has been sampled by Pet Shop Boys, Beyonce and Ne-Yo, among others.<\/p>\n
LaDonna Adrian Gaines was born on December 31, 1948, in Boston. She grew up singing in church, and in the late 1960s moved to Germany after being cast in a touring production of the Broadway rock musical \u201cHair.\u201d In the early 1970s, while continuing to work as a singer in Europe, she was briefly married to Austrian actor Hellmuth Sommer. When the two divorced, she kept a variation of his last name as her stage name.<\/p>\n
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Summer shot to prominence with the 1975 release of \u201cLove to Love You Baby,\u201d which became a hit in dance clubs across Europe and the United States. She had another hit single with 1977\u2019s \u201cI Feel Love,\u201d whose synthesized sound is credited with helping to pioneer electronic dance music. In 1978 Summer had her first number-one hit in America with a disco arrangement of the Jimmy Webb song \u201cMacArthur Park.\u201d That same year, Summer played an aspiring disco singer in the movie \u201cThank God It\u2019s Friday.\u201d She won her first Grammy Award, in the best R&B female vocal performance category, for \u201cLast Dance,\u201d which appeared on the movie\u2019s soundtrack. \u201cLast Dance\u201d also scored an Academy Award for best original song. In 1979 she had three more number-one singles: \u201cHot Stuff,\u201d \u201cBad Girls\u201d and a duet with Barbra Streisand, \u201cNo More Tears (Enough Is Enough).\u201d Other hits that year for Summer, who had become one of the most successful singers of the disco era, included \u201cDim All the Lights\u201d and \u201cOn the Radio.\u201d<\/p>\n
After disco\u2019s popularity peaked in the late 1970s, Summer began recording in a variety of musical genres, from new wave rock to gospel. She even penned a song, \u201cStarting Over Again,\u201d that became a number-one country single for Dolly Parton in 1980. In 1983 Summer released her 11th studio album, \u201cShe Works Hard for the Money,\u201d which reached number nine on the U.S. Billboard chart and whose title track became a pop-rock feminist anthem. She had the last top 10 single of her career in 1989 with \u201cThis Time I Know It\u2019s for Real.\u201d<\/p>\n
Summer, who moved to Nashville with her second husband in the mid-1990s, continued to record and perform, earning her fifth Grammy in 1998, in the best dance recording category, for \u201cCarry On.\u201d In 2008 she released her 17th and final studio album, \u201cCrayons,\u201d which included three songs that made it onto the dance music charts. In 2009 Summer performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, in honor of President Barack Obama. The music icon\u2019s last single, \u201cTo Paris With Love,\u201d was released in 2010.<\/p>\n
On May 17, 2012, Summer, the mother of three daughters, died from non-smoking-related lung cancer. She was buried in Nashville.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On this day in 2012, singer and songwriter Donna Summer, who rose to fame during the 1970s with such disco anthems as \u201cLove to Love You Baby\u201d and \u201cHot Stuff,\u201d dies at age 63 in Naples, Florida, after battling cancer. Also known for such 1980s hits as \u201cShe Works Hard for the Money,\u201d the five-time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}