Donna Summer

LaDonna Adrian Gaines grew up singing in church in Boston and left for Europe in the late 1960s, eventually settling in Munich where she met producer Giorgio Moroder. Their partnership yielded the album I Remember Yesterday (1977) and the track that changed everything: “I Feel Love” — 17 minutes on its extended cut, built almost entirely from synthesizers, with a pulsing Moog sequencer pattern that felt like music from another decade. Brian Eno heard it and told David Bowie it was “the sound of the future.”

Summer had already had major success with the 17-minute “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) and would go on to “Hot Stuff,” “Last Dance,” “Bad Girls,” and “She Works Hard for the Money.” But “I Feel Love” is the inflection point: it pointed from disco’s orchestral roots directly toward the synthesizer-driven house and techno music of the 1980s and beyond, connecting the dance music lineage that runs from Philly soul through disco to electronic club culture.

She became a born-again Christian in 1979, a transition that complicated her relationship with the gay audience that had most fervently embraced her. She died of lung cancer in 2012, aged 63. For this graph she is the bridge between disco and electronic dance music.