Donna Summer

In a Roxbury pew at Grant AME Church, an eight-year-old filled in for a missing soloist and stunned the room. "She sang one day at church," her sister Jeanette Yancey remembered. "We couldn't believe the voice that came out of her. She had no singing classes, no nothing." The song was Mahalia Jackson's "I Found the Answer," and Summer later named Jackson directly as "probably my first spiritual inspiration" — the moment, in her own telling, that she first realized she could sing.

listen: upstream & heresource: ABC News — Donna Summer ↗share

1959

I Found the AnswerMahalia Jackson

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1980

I Believe in JesusDonna Summer

listen forJackson's 1959 recording rides a plain piano and choir under a voice that holds long notes and lets them swell instead of rushing the phrase. Summer's "I Believe in Jesus," cut after her 1979 born-again conversion, strips the synth-disco away entirely and returns to that same unhurried, church-trained hold — the pop belt set aside for the patient, testifying delivery she credited Jackson with teaching her.

At seventeen, fronting the Boston blues-rock band the Crow, Summer was taken by bandleader Hoby Cook to the Psychedelic Supermarket, a club where Janis Joplin's band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, blew through town on tour. The show, one critic later wrote, "made an indelible impression on the Crow's lead singer, Donna Gaines." Cutting her own material a decade later for Bad Girls, Summer "channeled Janis Joplin" on the self-written "My Baby Understands" — proof those Boston club nights had never really left her voice.

listen: upstream & heresource: Boston Globe — Before she left Boston, Donna Summer found her voice (backs the church-solo story, sister Jeanette Yancey's quote, and the Janis Joplin/Psychedelic Supermarket detail) ↗share

1968

Piece of My HeartJanis Joplin

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1979

My Baby UnderstandsDonna Summer

listen forJoplin tears through "Piece of My Heart" with a rasping, over-the-top belt that breaks the polite pop melody apart at the chorus. On "My Baby Understands," Summer drops the disco croon for that same grain and gravel, pushing her voice past pretty and into a full-throated shout, briefly turning Bad Girls' glossy Moroder production into a blues-rock stage before the next track pulls it back to the dance floor.

Asked in 2003 about the singer-songwriters she admired — Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Aretha Franklin — Summer didn't stop at admiration. "The very first professional recording session I ever really did," she told Windy City Times, "was (singing) three Aretha Franklin songs, and they're on tape somewhere." That tape has never surfaced, but the claim is plain: before Munich, before Moroder, before disco, her earliest paid work as a singer was trying to sound like Aretha Franklin.

listen: upstream & heresource: Windy City Times — Summer All Year Long ↗share

1967

I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)Aretha Franklin

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1976

Try Me, I Know We Can Make ItDonna Summer

listen forNo recording of that lost Aretha Franklin session survives, so the honest comparison here is stylistic, not a direct cover. On "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," Franklin drives a soul phrase hard against the beat, biting off the ends of words. Summer's "Try Me, I Know We Can Make It," cut in 1976 before the full Moroder sound took over, reaches for that same gospel-soul push and grit — the closest her catalog gets to the singer that unreleased tape once chased.