Singer
At a Glance…
Selected discography
Sources
Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic “I Will Survive” became the first number one disco hit, and the singer was crowned the Queen of Disco. She won a Grammy Award for the song, and released an album each year from 1973 to 1981, with each one of them making it to the Top 40. She left a life of alcohol and drug abuse behind to become a born-again Christian in 1982, and began incorporating gospel music into her repertoire. Her career was rallied by the disco revival of the 1990s.
Gaynor was born Gloria Fowles on September 7, 1949, in Newark, New Jersey, to Queenie May Proctor and Daniel Fowles. The couple never married because Proctor’s first husband would not grant her a divorce. Proctor had three children from her previous marriage, three with Fowles, including Gloria, and later had one more daughter. Her parents were an affectionate and loving couple, but her father eventually left the family. Gaynor was born several months later. An attempt to reconcile a few years later was unsuccessful, but resulted in the birth of the couple’s third child. Gaynor’s grandmother always lived nearby, and was involved in the children’s upbringing, though her child-rearing habits were much stricter and more physical than those of Gaynor’s mother. The family only attended church at holidays, much to their grandmother’s chagrin.
“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 Vaughn. Her father played the ukulele and guitar, and sang professionally in nightclubs with a group called Step ’n’ Fetchit. Her brothers, under their maternal grandmother’s influence, 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 he was too young. Arthur later acted as a tour manager for Gaynor. The six children and their mother lived in a cramped lower flat in Newark. They were 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. She grew up as a tomboy, and began struggling with her weight when she was a teen.
“All through my young life I wanted to sing, although nobody in my family knew it,” Gaynor wrote in her autobiography. She was a member of her school choir,
At a Glance…
Born Gloria Fowles on September 7, 1949, in Newark, NJ; daughter of Daniel Fowles and Queenie May Proctor.
Career: Singer. Recorded her first single, “She’ll Be Sorry,’ 1965; toured with Soul Satisfiers, c. 1969-70; sang for City Life, c. 1970-76; released Never Can Say Goodbye, 1975; “I Will Survive” became a worldwide number one hit, 1979; became a born-again Christian and began singing gospel, 1982; published autobiography I Will Survive, 1997.
Awards: Grammy Award for Best Disco Record for “I Will Survive,” 1980.
Address: Agent —c/o PolyGram Holding, Inc., Worldwide Plaza, 825 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10019.
the mixed chorus, and the girls’ glee club. Because no one in the house paid attention to her singing, Gaynor never got the feeling that any of them thought she had a good voice, but after an initial rush of stage fright before her first solo, Gaynor’s confidence in her singing grew. Gaynor graduated from high school with honors, and knew she wanted a singing career. To appease her mother, who wanted Gaynor to have “something to fall back on,” Gaynor went to beauty school and took business courses. While she continued to practice her singing, she worked many non-singing jobs in the years after high school, including a job at Bamberger’s department store.
Gaynor practiced her singing in her apartment, where her upstairs neighbor could hear her. As it turned out, the man upstairs was a bandleader at a local nightclub, who recognized his downstairs songbird one night when she was in the audience. He called her onstage to sing with the band, and the next night, she began singing with Eddie McClendon and the Pacesetters, who also took her on tour. After the band returned home and Gaynor was out of a singing job, Gaynor’s brother, Arthur, coaxed other nightclub owners into letting his sister sing.
Gaynor spent years on the “chitterling circuit,” as she called it, making so little money that she could only afford chitterlings to eat. She sang Top 40 hits with house bands in bars and clubs, promoting herself by word of mouth. She picked up the stage name Gloria Gaynor when she recorded her first song, “She’ll Be Sorry,” on the Josida record label. The song was a minor hit and kept her on the road for a few months. Soon after, she found a place in a group called the Soul Satisfiers, and toured the United States with them for more than a year until 1970, when she played with an all-white band called City Life. Her days on the “chitterling circuit” came to a close in 1972 and 1973, as the disco era unfolded.
After three auditions, legendary producer Clive Davis signed Gaynor to the Columbia record label. “Honey Bee” was Gaynor’s first solo single on Columbia. She moved to New York City and was still successfully touring with City Life, singing “Honey Bee” and “Never Can Say Goodbye,” which had been previously recorded by both Isaac Hayes and the Jackson Five. She recorded “Never Can Say Goodbye” for MGM, and it became one of the first disco hits. Gaynor was the first to record an extended-play remix especially for play in dance clubs, and her 12-inch dance singles from the era have remained hot among collectors. MGM released Gaynor’s debut album, Never Can Say Goodbye, which went gold. Experience Gloria Gaynor was released in 1975 and made it to the Top 40, as did 1976’s I’ve Got You (Under My Skin). Her next two albums and the single “After the Loving” also hit the Top 40. She was officially named “Queen of the Discos” in March of 1976 at Club Les Jardins in New York City.
In 1978 Gaynor discovered that her former manager had squandered all her earnings and had incurred huge debts in her name. After a fall on stage, she was sidelined by surgery on her spine, and wore a back brace from her hips to her underarms for three months. She married music publisher Linwood Simon, who had become her manager, in 1979.
“I Will Survive” originally was a B-side to the single “Substitute.” The song featured strings, a rousing beat, and a big vocal performance from Gaynor. It became an instant hit with club DJs and started getting play at Manhattan’s famed disco club, Studio 54. The public response was tremendous. The song became an anthem to anyone who had ever struggled to overcome—it became an anthem to women, the depressed, to the gay community, even to Gaynor herself. After her scare in the hospital, the song was as much about her inspiration and survival as it was about anyone else’s. It became a number one hit worldwide, sold 14 million copies, and was featured on the album Love Tracks.
In 1980 Gaynor won the first and only Grammy Award for Best Disco Record—the award category was eliminated upon the fall of disco soon after. The Queen of Disco was alive and well and touring the world, appearing on television and radio, fueled by the success of the single that defined the disco era. “I Will Survive” was translated into some twenty languages, including Arabic, and remained a popular dance and club track more than twenty years later. It has been re-released and remixed countless times, and appears on countless soundtracks and compilations.
In 1990 Gaynor re-recorded “I Will Survive” for release on Gloria Gaynor 90, which went gold in 1991,though she changed the words slightly to reflect her Christian views. Gaynor has performed in more than eighty countries, and remains popular in Europe. She headlined the first East-West unification concert, and has performed for such international personalities as President Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, Princess Grace, and Oprah Winfrey. The French World Cup Soccer team named Gaynor the team “godmother” after they won the 1998 World Cup, and claimed “I Will Survive” as their anthem.
With the riches of stardom also came its pitfalls. Gaynor and her husband had drugs and alcohol at their disposal. Though many of the songs on her albums II Have a Right, Stories, and I Kinda Like Me were love songs to her husband, the marriage was suffering. Gaynor went through alternate phases of religiousness and indulgence as she struggled to find herself. Her tenth album, Gloria Gaynor, was released in 1982, after which Gaynor became a born-again Christian, leaving her years of alcohol and drug abuse behind her. In 1985 she began incorporating a gospel song called “I Will Survive” into her concerts, and began hosting a British radio show called The Gospel Train. Eventually she steered away from recording secular love songs in favor of gospel tunes, writing many of the lyrics herself. She performed her disco hits during the first half of her concerts, and her gospel songs during the second. She gave up singing secular music for a time altogether at a concert in England called “Farewell Secular Music, Hello Gospel.” Finances were lean for Gaynor during this time, as she quit performing until she could reconcile her Christianity with her secular music.
Gaynor ultimately regained a balance between her secular and religious songs, and her career got a second wind during the disco revival of the mid-1990s. In 1999 she appeared for two weeks in the Broadway musical Smokey Joe’s Café. She has been involved in countless charities, including the United Cerebral Palsy Organization, The Rita Hayworth Gala for Alzheimer’s, Revlon’s Annual Walk for Life, The Michael Bolton Foundation, and Whitney Houston’s Foundation, among others. She signed with the popular Wilhelmina modeling agency, and made appearances on the popular television sitcoms That ’70s Show and the popular Ally McBeal. Her life story was the subject of an episode of the VH-1 biography series Behind the Music. The music-video network also named “I Will Survive” the greatest dance hit of all time.
Selected discography
Experience Gloria Gaynor, MGM, 1975.
Never Can Say Goodbye, MGM, 1975.
I’ve Got You, Polydor, 1976.
Glorious, Polydor, 1977.
Park Avenue Sound, Polydor, 1978.
Have a Right, Spring, 1979.
Love Tracks, Polydor, 1979.
Stories, Polydor, 1980.
I Kinda Like Me, Polydor, 1981.
Gloria Gaynor, Polydor, 1983.
I Am Gloria Gaynor, Chrysalis, 1984.
The Power of Gloria Gaynor, Stylus, 1986.
Gloria Gaynor 90, New Music, 1990.
I Will Survive, 1990.
Sources
Books
Gaynor, Gloria, I Will Survive, St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
George-Warren, Holly, and Patricia Romanowski, editors, Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Rolling Stone Press, 2001.
Larkin, Colin, editor, Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Muze UK, Ltd., 1998.
On-line
All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (June 29, 2002).
Gloria Gaynor Homepage, http://www.gloriagaynor.com (May 28, 2002).
—Brenna Sanchez
