"Full of Emptiness" was excised from all CD reissues, as the track was re-mixed and re-released on her next album, 1975's Love to Love You Baby. Being formerly married to an Austrian, Donna Summer was a fluent German speaker and recorded a number of songs in that language. The track "Lady of the Night" is popular in Germany, receiving air time on radio stations that feature classics of the sixties and seventies. The songs, written by the Moroder/Bellotte team, are mostly of the pop/rock/folk variety. The album, which was produced by Pete Bellotte, was released only in The Netherlands, and spawned the minor hit singles " The Hostage" and "Lady of the Night" in that country. Rolling Stone magazine wrote in 2003: “Madonna’s career without Summer and ‘Bad Girls’? Unthinkable.Lady of the Night is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Donna Summer, released on February 26, 1974. Yet it was her more raucous early work that influenced generations of female performers. She became a born-again Christian by the mid-1980s, and many of her later songs had religious themes. As she leaned out, her foot got caught in the drapes, preventing her fall. She wrote in her 2003 memoir that she climbed onto the windowsill of her Central Park hotel room.
Summer’s success in the late 1970s, she suffered from depression and attempted suicide. Besides Sudano, survivors include a daughter from her first marriage and two daughters from her second marriage.Īmid Ms. Summer married musician and producer Bruce Sudano. In Germany, she married Austrian actor Helmut Sommer and changed her last name to Summer. He later became a member of Brooklyn Dreams in the late '70s, which had a top 5 hit with Heaven Knows, a. Sudano co-founded the late '60s pop-rock band Alive N Kickin’, which scored a top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with Tighter, Tighter. 31, 1948, and grew up in Boston, where her father worked as a butcher, janitor and electrician. Donna Summer married her fellow musician and songwriter, Bruce Sudano, on July 16, 1980. After “a salacious guitar-drenched rendition of ‘Hot Stuff,’ ” Billboard wrote, “fans rushed down the red carpeted aisles toward the stage.” Her electrifying performances were known to draw sellout crowds.ĭuring a 1998 concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, Billboard magazine wrote that after two hours of raucous - but polite - ovations, the audience couldn’t take it anymore. Summer’s lasting popularity was buoyed by legions of black, Latin and gay fans. She quickly returned to the restroom and began composing the song on toilet paper. “And my first thought was, ‘God, she works hard for her money, that lady,’ ” Ms. She was at a Grammy Awards party when she spotted the women’s restroom attendant asleep from exhaustion. Summer said her 1983 hit “She Works Hard For the Money” was inspired by a trip to the restroom. 1 on the Billboard top 200, powered by hits including “Hot Stuff” and the catchy, horn-infused “Bad Girls.” 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.” Summer returned to the United States in 1975 as one of disco’s shining stars. Propelled by “Love to Love You Baby,” Ms. Summer, citing her upbringing in a strict and religious household, said she approached the song as a piece of theater and was merely acting her part.) Summer’s sultry moans, breathy singing and sexually explicit lyrics - “Do it to me again and again” - the song became an instant hit in discotheques and underground clubs. 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. Lyrics to 'The Hostage' by DONNA SUMMER: Lady: Hallo / Kidnapper: / Lady weve just kidnapped your husband / Have 800,000 ready by tomorrow night / And lady no police / Or youll never see your husband alive again / Lady: Hallo / I remember standing there so petrified / My hand frozen to the phone / As a stra.
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. Summer “made some of the freshest, most substantial dance records of a period noted for its froth and foolishness.” In a 1984 assessment of her career, Times pop music critic Robert Palmer wrote that Ms.
She co-wrote many of her hip-gyrating disco tunes. 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.