The Friday Mixtape–Remembering Donna Summer & Chuck Brown [Voices]

Because her sound was so rooted in the mechanics of disco, with its glittering synths and pulsating beats, some people don’t know that the five-time Grammy winner was also an amazingly accomplished vocalist. Her mezzo-soprano voice transcends even the genre she pioneered. Before she became the Queen of Disco, she sang gospel in church and in her early 20s moved to Europe, where she performed in musicals like “Godspell” and “Showboat” and joined the Viennese Folk Opera.

“When I hear other people singing, I think, ‘God, it’s great, it’s a great gift, what a great gift,’ ” Summer told MTV News. “And probably one of the gifts that people want the most is to be able to sing, and for obvious reasons — it’s soothing, it’s stimulating, it’s encouraging, it’s sad, it covers every spectrum of emotion.”

- John Mitchell, MTV News

“I went to see him in D.C. one time,” [George] Clinton reminisced back in ’94. “He knew that I was in the audience, so he played ‘Up For The Down Stroke’ and just crushed it. Then, on top of it, when he got to the bridge, he held it for like 20 minutes. I was like, ‘Damn, this man just got up in my face and killed me with my own song. That go-go is deadly.’”

- From The Beat: Go-Go’s Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop, by Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson Jr.

But, I wonder, given Donna’s disco-derived image, doesn’t she feel she’s been manipulated too?

“Constantly,” she says, tilting her head in a little-girl-share-a-secret pose. “And it can be pretty frightening when you realize you’re a part of the machine. But you can always change that. In the beginning it was like being a commodity. The image and the person got characterized as one and the same, and I was saying, ‘No, wait. There’s more to me than meets the eye – maybe twenty pounds more.’ By the time of Spring Affair [1976], it was enough. I couldn’t go on singing those soft songs. I’ve sung gospel and Broadway musicals all my life and you have to have a belting voice for that. And because my skin is black they categorize me as a black act, which is not the truth. I’m not even a soul singer. I’m more a pop singer.”

- Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, 1978

Candlelight vigil for Chuck Brown. Image: LaVan Anderson. Courtesy: Howard Theatre/princeofpetworth.com

She was, in short, an honorary New Yorker. Which I imagine is how hundreds of born-and-bred New Yorkers unconsciously regard the news today of her untimely death at age 63 from (reportedly) lung cancer. Regardless of where her upbringing and musical training had taken her — a childhood and adolescence singing in churches in Dorchester, salad days in Germany in the musical Hair before she met her Berlin-based studio collaborator Giorgio Moroder — Donna, to the end, belonged to all of us: outerborough ethnics; Manhattan velvet-rope aesthetes (and those who pretended); the gay, black and Latino communities.

Of course, if you’re reading this in Detroit or Las Vegas or Minneapolis or Atlanta or Los Angeles or London, Donna spoke to you, too. Considering her lifelong association with a communal, hedonistic pop-culture moment, it’s remarkable when one plays back her oeuvre how intimate, almost solitary her great works really were. Call her the Wanderer, for her ability to stretch, adapt and transmogrify dance music until it embraced everyone and everything.

- Chris Molanphy, The Village Voice

Indirectly, his legacy has also influenced songs like Jay-Z’s “Do It Again” (sampling Go-Go band Rare Essence’s “Overnight Scenario,” and who were also featured on the remix of Ludacris’s “Pimpin’ All Over”); Wale’s “Pretty Girls (sampling Backyard Band’s “Girls”); and the appearance of Go-Go band E.U. in Spike Lee’s “School Daze” movie (their song, “Da Butt” topped Billboard’s R&B chart).

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