Donna Summer

The Boston choir singer who went to Germany to be in a musical and came back having rebuilt what dance music sounded like. Donna Adrian Gaines was born on December 31, 1948, the third of seven children of a butcher and a schoolteacher, and raised in the Mission Hill neighborhood. She sang in public for the first time at ten, standing in at church for a soloist who failed to turn up. She left high school before graduating, fronted a blues-rock band called Crow in New York, and in August 1968 took a part in the Munich production of Hair. She stayed in Europe for years — studying at the Vienna Volksoper, appearing in Godspell and Show Boat, marrying the Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer in 1973 and keeping his name after the divorce with the spelling anglicized.

Session work at Musicland Studios in Munich put her in a room with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Love to Love You Baby reached No. 2 in America in 1975; I Feel Love followed in 1977, built entirely on synthesizers, and Moroder has called it the start of electronic dance music. Then came Last Dance, MacArthur Park, Hot Stuff, Dim All the Lights, On the Radio, and the Barbra Streisand duet. She was the first artist to send three consecutive double albums to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, placed four No. 1 singles inside thirteen months, and became the first act signed to Geffen Records in 1980. Around 130 million records, five Grammy Awards. She died of lung cancer on May 17, 2012, in Naples, Florida, aged 63, and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the following year. In 2024 she became the first solo woman to receive a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Grammy Hall of Fame induction in the same year.