GLORIA GAYNOR, 'NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE'

Gloria Gaynor

Today, The Grandma has been tidying her disco boxes. She has a great collection of LP's and Singles in vinyl. New technologies and digital methods have improved the quality of sound and music but The Grandma is a great romantic and she likes listening to these old vinyls, some of them with terrible interferences and noise.

She has paid a special attention to Gloria Gaynor's songs, the American artist who was born on a day like today in 1947 and became the Queen of the dance floor with her unforgettable and mythic songs that never go out of style. It is very difficult to create a song and a kind of music that can be considered timeless. The Grandma thinks that Gloria Gaynor is one of these timeless artists although the best example of music that survives all ages and always seems current one is, without any kind of doubt, ABBA.

Before listening to Gloria Gaynor, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

17. Dynamic Tables (II) (Spanish Version)

Gloria Gaynor (born September 7, 1947) is an American singer, best known for the disco era hits I Will Survive, Never Can Say Goodbye, Let Me Know (I Have a Right), Can't take my eyes off of you, Reach out, I will there and I Am What I Am.

Gloria Fowles was born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, to Daniel Fowles and Queenie Mae Proctor. Her grandmother lived nearby and was involved in her upbringing. There was always music in our house, Gaynor wrote in her autobiography, I Will Survive. She enjoyed listening to the radio, and to records by Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan. Her father played the ukulele and guitar and sang professionally in nightclubs with a group called Step 'n' Fetchit.

Gloria grew up a tomboy: she had five brothers, but no sister. Her brothers sang gospel and formed a quartet with a friend. Gaynor was not allowed to sing with the all-male group, nor was her younger brother Arthur, because Gloria was a girl and he was too young. Arthur later acted as a tour manager for Gaynor. The family was relatively poor, but Gaynor recalls the house being filled with laughter and happiness, and the dinner table being open to neighborhood friends. They moved to a housing project in 1960, where Gaynor went to South Side High School. All through my young life I wanted to sing, although nobody in my family knew it, Gaynor wrote in her autobiography.

Gloria Gaynor

Gaynor began singing in a night club in Newark, NJ., where she was recommended to a local band by a neighbor. After several years of performing in local clubs and along the east coast, Gaynor began her recording career in 1971 at Columbia Records.

Gaynor was a singer with the Soul Satisfiers, a jazz/R&B music band, in the 1960s. She recorded She'll Be Sorry/Let Me Go Baby, for the first time as Gloria Gaynor in 1965, for Johnny Nash's Jocida label. Her first real success came in 1975 when she was signed to Columbia Records by Clive Davis. The fruit of that was the release of the flop single Honey Bee. Moving on to MGM Records she finally hit with the album Never Can Say Goodbye on MGM. The first side of the album consisted of three songs (Honey Bee, Never Can Say Goodbye and Reach Out, I'll Be There) with no break between the songs. This 19-minute dance marathon proved to be enormously popular, especially at dance clubs.

All three songs were released as singles via radio edits and all of them became hits. The album was instrumental in introducing disco music to the public, Never Can Say Goodbye becoming the first song to top Billboard magazine's dance chart. It also marked her first significant chart success internationally, making it into the Top 5 in Australia, Canada, Germany and the UK. The song would go on to be certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry, and subsequently gold in the US.

More information: Gloria Gaynor Official Website

Capitalizing on the success of her first album, she quickly released her second album, Experience Gloria Gaynor, later that same year. Some of her lesser-known singles, due to lack of recurrent airplay -including Honey Bee (1974), Casanova Brown (1975), and Let's Make A Deal (1976), as well as her cover of The Four Tops' Reach Out, I'll Be There became hits in the clubs and disco charts.

Her cover of How High The Moon topped the US Dance Charts, and made the lower parts of both the Pop and R&B charts, as well as achieving some international chart success. After her 1976 album, I've Got You, she shifted from her hit production team, to work with other productions. Gaynor has recorded some 16 albums since, including one in England, one in Germany, and two in Italy.

In the next few years, Gaynor released the albums Glorious and Gloria Gaynor's Park Avenue Sound, but would only enjoy a few more moderate hits. However, in late 1978, with the release of her album Love Tracks, she climbed the pop charts again with her smash hit single I Will Survive. The lyrics of this song are written from the point of view of a woman, recently dumped, telling her former lover that she can cope without the person and does not want anything more to do with the person. The song has become something of an anthem of female emancipation. Interestingly, the song I Will Survive was originally the B-side when Polydor Records released it in late 1978.

Gloria Gaynor

The A-side, a song called Substitute, then a recent worldwide hit for South African girl-group Clout, was considered more radio friendly. 

Boston Disco Radio DJ Jack King, turned the record over and recalls being stunned by what he heard. I couldn't believe they were burying this monster hit on the B-side, says DJ King. I played it and played it and my listeners went nuts! This massive audience response forced the record company to flip the songs, so that subsequent copies of the single listed the more popular song on the A-side. King was honored at New York's Disco Masters Awards Show for 3 consecutive years (1979–1981) in recognition of his relentless push of the song. The song received the Grammy Award for Best Disco Recording in 1980, the only year that award was given.

As a disco number, the song was unique for its time by virtue of Gaynor's having no background singers or lush production. And, unlike her first disco hits, the track was not pitched up to make it faster and to render Gaynor's recorded voice in a higher register than that in which she actually sang.

Most disco hits at the time were heavily produced, with multiple voices, overdubs, and adjustments to pitch and speed. I Will Survive had a much more spare and clean sound. Had it been originally planned and released as an A-side, it would almost certainly have undergone a substantially more heavy-handed remix. In late 1979, she released the album I Have a Right which contained her next disco hit, Let Me Know (I Have a Right), which featured Doc Severinsen of The Tonight Show fame, on trumpet solo. Gaynor also recorded a disco song called Love Is Just a Heartbeat Away in 1979 for the vampire movie Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula which featured a number of Disco songs.

More information: CBS News

In 1980 and again in 1981, Gaynor released two disco albums which were virtually ignored in the United States due to the backlash against disco, which began late in 1979. The album's singles barely registered on Urban contemporary radio, where disco music remained popular.

In 1982, having looked into a wide variety of faiths and religious movements, she became a Christian and began to distance herself from a past she considered to be sinful. She would not release an album in 1982.

In 1983, she released an album entitled Gloria Gaynor, in which she rejected disco for mid-tempo R&B and Pop style songs. The album contained a patriotic song called America as well as a new version of I Will Survive. In this new version of I Will Survive, she changed the lyrics of the song in order to advertise her recent conversion to Christianity. The words It took all the strength I had not to fall apart were changed to Only the Lord could give me strength not to fall apart.

Gaynor would achieve her final success in the 1980s with the release of her album I Am Gloria Gaynor in 1984. This was mainly due to the song I Am What I Am, which became a hit at dance clubs, and then on the Club Play chart in late 1983/early 1984.

Gloria Gaynor

I Am What I Am became a gay anthem and made Gaynor a gay icon. Her 1986 album, The Power of Gloria Gaynor, was almost entirely composed of cover versions of other songs that were popular at the time. Gaynor supports LGBT rights.

Gaynor's career received a revitalizing spark in the early and mid 1990s with the worldwide disco revival movement. During the late 1990s, she dabbled in acting for a while, guest starring on The Wayans Bros, That '70s Show singing I Will Survive, and Ally McBeal, before doing a limited engagement performance in Broadway's Smokey Joe's Cafe. In 2001 Gaynor performed I Will Survive at the 30th Anniversary Concert for Michael Jackson.

Gloria Gaynor returned to the recording studio in 2002, releasing her first album in over 15 years, entitled, I Wish You Love. The two singles released from the album, Just Keep Thinking About You and I Never Knew, both topped Billboard's Hot Dance Music/Club Play. Both singles also secured moderate to heavy Dance format radio airplay. The latter song also charted #30 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart.

In 2004, Gaynor re-released her 1997 album The Answer, also released under the title What a Life, as a follow up to her successful album I Wish You Love. The album includes her popular club hit Oh, What a Life.

In late 2002, Gaynor appeared with many R&B stars on the Rhythm, Love, and Soul edition of the PBS series American Soundtrack. Her performance of the Disco hit I Will Survive and new single I Never Knew was included on the accompanying live album that was released in 2004.

On September 19, 2005, Gaynor was honored twice when she and her music were inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame, in the Artist category along with fellow disco legends Chic and Sylvester. Her classic anthem I Will Survive was inducted under the Records category. In January 2008, The American Diabetes Association named Gaynor the Honorary Spokesperson of the 2008 NYC Step Out to Fight Diabetes Walk. 

More information: Nashville Scene

More television appearances followed in the late 2000s with 2009 appearances on The John Kerwin Show, The Wendy Williams Show, and The View to promote the 30th anniversary of I Will Survive. In 2010, she appeared on Last Comic Standing and The Tonight Show.

On May 16, 2015, Gloria Gaynor was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Music by Dowling College.

In 2016, Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive was selected for induction into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

In 2017 Gloria made a cameo appearance as a flight attendant in a Capital One commercial, while Samuel L. Jackson, Charles Barkley, and Spike Lee sang I Will Survive.

On May 6, 2017, Gloria Gaynor performed with her band at the Library of Congress' celebration of disco music at Bibliodiscotheque, a disco dance party in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson building.

Due to the devastation wreaked by hurricane Harvey on the state of Texas in August 2017, Gaynor rewrote the lyrics to I Will Survive, changing the title to Texas Will Survive.

More information: The Guardian

I have never been a different person

onstage than I am off.

Gloria Gaynor