Donna Summer

She honed her soulful sound in a Boston church choir, but she shot to fame with some very worldly moans. With a voice that could range from airy to sultry in the space of a phrase, Donna Summer, who was 63 when she died May 17 after a long battle with cancer, was the indisputable queen of disco. Her career took off in 1975 when she teamed with producer Giorgio Moroder to record the multiorgasmic “Love to Love You Baby,” the first in a string of dance-floor classics that includes “I Feel Love”–a landmark of synthesizer-driven pop–as well as “Bad Girls,” “Last Dance,” “Heaven Knows” and the barn-burning duet with Barbra Streisand “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” And don’t forget “She Works Hard for the Money.” Though Summer’s career slowed down in the late 1980s, her roll call of hits is timeless. Simply to say their names, and hers, is to invoke an era of mirror-ball glamour.