How Donna Summer made black female history on the country charts before Beyoncé
nypost.comthe first black woman to go No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs with her bluessgrassy bop “Texas Hold ’Em.”But, in the last week of Black History Month, we gotta give props to another African-American diva who broke down genre barriers on the country charts long before Bey made her two-step statement.That would be Donna Summer, who, when she was the Queen of Disco, made her own history as the first African-American woman to co-write a No.
1 country single in 1980 with “Starting Over Again,” a tune that the late legend wrote with her widower Bruce Sudano for none other than Dolly Parton.Take a minute and think about that. (We’ll wait.)That’s also 43 years before Tracy Chapman became the first black woman to be the sole writer of the top tune on Billboard’s Hot Country Airplay chart with Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car” last summer.Summer and Sudano — who got married in May 1980, the same month that “Starting Over Again” became Parton’s 12th country chart-topper — had previously co-written the certified disco classic “Bad Girls” together.But “Starting Over Again” — a country-pop ballad, from Parton’s “Dolly, Dolly, Dolly” album about getting your giddy up back post-divorce — was a radical departure from the Studio 54 anthems that had made Summer the Beyoncé of the disco generation. “I loved it,” Summer — who died from lung cancer in 2012 at age 63 — said of Parton’s rendition to Country Music Today magazine in 2003. “It was so exciting to me.
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