best Donna Summer songs (A-Z) ↓↓↓

Donna Summer info & bio

Donna Adrian Gaines (December 31, 1948 – May 17, 2012), known professionally as Donna Summer, was an American singer and songwriter. She gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s and became known as the "Queen of Disco", while her music gained a global following.

Influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, Summer became the lead singer of a psychedelic rock band named Crow and moved to New York City. In 1968, she joined a German adaptation of the musical Hair in Munich, where she spent several years living, acting, and singing. There, she met music producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and they went on to record influential disco hits together such as "Love to Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love", marking Summer's breakthrough into international music markets. Summer returned to the United States in 1976, and more hits such as "Last Dance", "MacArthur Park", "Heaven Knows", "Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls", "Dim All the Lights", "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" with Barbra Streisand, and "On the Radio" followed.

A hitmaker on the Billboard Hot 100 for two decades, Summer recorded 32 chart singles on the chart, with 14 top ten singles and four number ones. Her first top ten hit, "Love to Love You Baby", peaked at number two in 1976, while her last top ten single, "This Time I Know It's for Real", reached number seven in 1989, spanning thirteen years. Summer also made chart history in 1979 by being the first female solo recording artist to record three number one singles in the same calendar year ("Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls" and "No More Tears (Enough is Enough")"). Summer sent a song to the top 40 for nine consecutive years (1976-1984). Summer's last Hot 100 hit, "I Will Go with You (Con te partirò)", charted in 1999. Summer was mostly successful on the magazine's Hot Dance Club Songs chart where she recorded 16 number one singles.

Summer died in 2012 from lung cancer, at her home in Naples, Florida. In her obituary in The Times, she was described as the "undisputed queen of the Seventies disco boom" who reached the status of "one of the world's leading female singers." Moroder described Summer's work on the song "I Feel Love" as "really the start of electronic dance" music. In 2013, Summer was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In December 2016, Billboard ranked her sixth on its list of the "Greatest of All Time Top Dance Club Artists".