Last Dance

Music is a very important part of my life and always has been, but the time in my life that I really began to identify with music and form my opinions of what I loved and purchased probably started in my middle school and ran through my very early high school years, 1976 to 1979. A new genre of music exploded onto the scene in 1977 with the release of a film called Saturday Night Fever, Disco. You could not turn on a radio without hearing the high-pitched voices of the Bee Gees and the driving beat behind them. Disco became THE music, and I was a huge fan! My middle school days were way before the dawn of the digital age. There were no iPods, iTunes, or YouTube. Even computers were reserved for places like NASA, and they were housed in huge rooms. You certainly couldn't hold one in your hand. If you wanted to hear a particular song, you could do one of 2 things: 1. sit and wait for it to come on the radio at the ready to push PLAY and RECORD simultaneously on your snazzy cassette recorder that allowed you to tape things off the airwaves or 2. you could purchase a vinyl record of the single called a "45" to play on your very own stereo turntable. One artist, in particular, although she was not featured on the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, was my favorite singer of the disco era. Her name was Donna Summer. She had this velvet, mezzo soprano voice, and her songs were the songs that I lived for that moment riding in the car when they would come on. I'd yell, "Turn it up! Turn it up!" to whoever was driving as soon as I heard those first driving beats of She Works Hard for the Money, Bad Girls, or Hot Stuff among many others. My absolute favorite above all of her recordings, 5 winning Grammys, was Last Dance. Excitement is an understatement of how I felt every time that song came on the radio. Starting out with her dulcet tones singing the refrain in a slow tempo with an ethereal feel to it, but then taking off in that driving beat that was a Disco dancer's dream. She was the Queen of disco, and she was worthy of the crown. Even if you hated disco, I defy you to listen to a Donna Summer song and stay completely still. No, they weren't filled with thought-provoking lyrics, and, pretty much, all of them sounded the same, but they were about the beat and the voice and rousing you to your feet to do the rope hustle or the pretzel. I wore out that "45" standing alone in my room belting out Last Dance with Donna. She provided the soundtrack to my early teen years. We lost Donna Summer to cancer yesterday at the age of 63. I would say Rest in Peace, but it doesn't really seem fitting for someone who provided so many of us with the music we loved to dance to for years. So I'll just say, "Enjoy your disco welcome party, Donna. You'll never have to worry about the "last dance" again.