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| Donna Summer 1977, Source:Wikimedia Commons |
I loved the "Queen of Disco" because she grew up in the Mission Hill section of Boston - about 20 minutes from me. She was from a working class family like mine. It made me feel like I knew her and I always thought I might run into her walking down the street. (I never did).
She was cool and confident and beautiful. My favorite songs were Last Dance, Hot Stuff, and Bad Girls. Love to Love You Baby was cool and sexy - maybe too sexy for me at the time.
One song that played on MTV all the time was called She Works Hard for the Money. It was about a real working woman Donna Summer met in the bathroom at a Grammy Awards party in Hollywood. Only rich, famous people attended the party and when Summer went into the bathroom, she saw a woman who was working as a washroom attendant sitting in the corner, sleeping. The woman said she was exhausted from working long hours, trying to make a living. And Summer thought this woman sure works hard for the money. She wrote that line down and made it into a song. The woman's name was Onetta Johnson and there is a line in the song attributed to her that goes "Onetta there in the corner stand, wondering where she is, and it's strange to her, some people seem to have everything."
Donna Summer even had Onetta pose with her for a picture for the back of the album cover. If you pull up the album, "She Works Hard for the Money" you'll see a picture of Onetta Johnson and Donna Summer dressed as waitresses and smiling.
The video on MTV for She Works Hard for the Money told the story of a single mother of two kids who scrubbed floors, waited tables, and worked in a factory to make ends meet. She'd walk home at the end of the day carrying her groceries, then she'd cook supper for her kids and go bed - dreaming about a better life, but never figuring out how to escape the rat race.
It was a poignant video that told the story of the plight of working class people who can never get ahead. And it was thanks to Onetta that the song even existed. That video still rings true today for the struggling working class. Sad and true.
She died May 17, 2012 from lung cancer. She was only 63.
She really was something.
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| Donna Summer 1980, Source: Wikimedia Commons |
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