The Intro
US soul singer Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic I Will Survive was originally an afterthought, a B-side, with little studio sheen added. It’s now considered a feminist and LGBTQ+ anthem and is a karaoke mainstay.
Before
Gaynor was born Gloria Fowles on 7 September 1943 in Newark, New Jersey. Music was a constant in her youth, with her father Daniel singing and playing ukulele as part of a nightclub group called Step ‘n’ Fetch-it. The Fowles were a large, poor family – five boys and two girls, including Gloria. Four brothers formed a gospel group but she wasn’t allowed to join them. The family moved to a housing project in 1960 and a year later Fowles graduated.
She became a singer in a local nightclub and within a few years she was part of jazz and R’n’B group The Soul Satisfiers. In 1965, as Gloria Gaynor, she released her debut single She’ll Be Sorry. It was produced by Johnny Nash, later to have a UK number 1 with Tears on My Pillow (I Can’t Take It). It was Nash who had suggested she change her name.
Nothing came of it but Gaynor spent years becoming experienced at performing live. Then in 1973 she was signed to Columbia Records by Clive Davis and released another flop, Honey Bee.
Gaynor hit pay dirt when she signed to MGM Records and released debut album Never Can Say Goodbye in 1975. The first side consisted of a remake of Honey Bee, plus covers of soul classics Never Can Say Goodbye and Reach Out, I’ll Be There. Thanks to an uncredited Tom Moulton, this record contained a historic first – it was the first album to consist of one long continuous mix of the tracks. This earned Moulton the title ‘father of the disco mix’. The title track became a hit single, peaking at two in the UK and nine in the US. Reach Out, I’ll Be There then reached 14 on these shores.
It began to look like Gaynor would be a flash in the pan as singles from Experience Gloria Gaynor didn’t grab the attention of the public. One exception was a cover of jazz standard How High the Moon, which climbed to 33 in 1975. Her next few albums – I’ve Got You (1976), Glorious (1977) and Gloria Gaynor’s Park Avenue Sound (1978) all bombed.
Gaynor’s next LP, Love Tracks, was recorded for release in November 1978. A month before that came the single Substitute. Her label Polydor thought this former Righteous Brothers track would be a worldwide hit as it had been for South Africa girlband Clout. However, several DJs – including Richie Kaczor of Studio 54 – began taking note of the B-side, I Will Survive, instead.
It had been written by two former Motown producers, Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren. The latter had co-written three Jackson 5 US number 1s – I Want You Back, The Love You Save and ABC. After being sacked by Motown, Fekaris was unemployed and wrote the lyrics to I Will Survive after seeing a song he’d written for Rare Earth being used on TV. He took it as a sign things would work out. And they did.
Fekaris and Perren formed their own production company and made Reunited with Peaches and Herb, which became a hit. Afterwards they decided to give I Will Survive to the next singer they worked with. Gaynor was the lucky one.
https://youtu.be/ARt9HV9T0w8
Review
On Gaynor’s previous hits, her voice was pitched up in order to make her songs faster for playing on the dancefloor. And as with most disco songs, the productions would feature a more polished, layered production. It’s interesting to consider whether I Will Survive would have been treated the same way had it been considered for the A-side originally. I’m not sure it would have the same power if it had been.
The highlight of the track is Gaynor’s raw, soulful performance. You really feel the hurt and anger in her voice and the message of the song suits an untamed vocal without any studio trickery. Though the performance is raw and the production understated, the piano at the beginning and the strings after the chorus do a great job of adding to the drama of the song.
Pop songs about love going wrong often portray the ‘loser’ as weak. Even the icy cool Debbie Harry lets the mask slip briefly in Heart of Glass. But what Gaynor does is fool us into thinking she’s not over her heartbreak during those opening lines. But once she sings ‘And I grew strong, and I learned how to get along’, the song moves up a notch, and from then on, Gaynor sounds like someone you shouldn’t mess with as she belts out those lyrics to I Will Survive.
Obviously, I Will Survive has survived and will always be considered one of the highlights of the disco era. It’s an alluring theme for a song, that of empowerment for the underdog, so there’s no wonder it was adopted, as previously mentioned, by feminists and the LGBTQ+ movement, both fighting back against an era in which political correctness wasn’t high on the agenda of mainstream culture.
However, although there is a lot to enjoy here, I Will Survive is not up there with my favourite disco songs. A lot of that, to be fair, isn’t down to the song, or to Gaynor. It’s the way it’s been done to death over the years by the media. It’s all the parodies. It’s drunk people bawling it when leaving the pub, followed by It’s Raining Men. It’s just a bit tiresome, sadly.
I used to wonder why Gaynor’s performance seemed slightly weird in the video to I Will Survive. It was filmed at the New York discotheque Xenon. Her stance is unusual and she looks genuinely pained. She was. Giving the song a whole new dimension is the fact that in 1978 Gaynor fell over a monitor on stage during a choreographed tug-of-war with her dancers. She was paralysed from the waist down and thought she would never walk again. Surgery helped Gaynor back on her feet but she recorded the song, and the video, in a lot of pain and wearing a back brace. It wasn’t until further surgery in 2018 that the pain went away.
As for the rollerskating dancer in the video, that was Sheila-Reid Pender from skating group The Village Wizards. Gaynor and Pender were filmed separately and didn’t meet until 2014 at a book signing event held for Gaynor’s autobiography, We Will Survive.
After
The song was a global smash and topped the charts in many countries. It came along just in time, as by the end of the year the disco backlash, mainly a thinly veiled excuse for homophobes, racists and sexists to vent anger, had begun.
Hits were few and far between from then on. Let Me Know (I Have a Right) climbed to 32 in the UK in 1979 but it was four years before her next success. She became a Christian in 1982 and distanced herself from what she considered a sinful past. Then in 1983 her version of I Am What I Am also became adopted by the gay community as an anthem and climbed to 13 in the UK chart.
For the rest of the 80s Gaynor continued to release music but nothing troubled the mainstream. DJ and producer Shep Pettibone remixes of I Will Survive were released in 1990. They didn’t chart, but Phil Kelsey’s remix in 1993 coincided with a nostalgic interest in disco and peaked at five. With Gaynor back in the public eye she turned to acting in the late 90s, with cameos in That 70s Show and Ally McBeal.
The Outro
Gaynor continues to release albums sporadically, and of course, I Will Survive has been revisited many times over her career, with remixes, Spanish language versions and lyrics sometimes rewritten to reflect her Christian beliefs and also referencing tragedies such as Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017. Her most recent album, the roots gospel collection Testimony, earned Gaynor her second Grammy, 20 years after her first.
There’s been many covers of I Will Survive over the years and the rock version by Cake in 1996 is well worth a mention.
The Info
Written by
Dino Fekaris & Freddie Perren
Producer
Dino Fekaris
Weeks at number 1
4 (17 March-13 April)
The Info
Births
9 April: Actor Ben Silverstone
10 April: Singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor
Deaths
19 March: Actor Richard Beckinsale
23 March: Footballer Ted Anderson
24 March: Founder of Tesco Sir Jack Cohen
30 March: Tory MP Airey Neave
Meanwhile…
17 March: Nottingham Forest defeat Southampton 3-2 at Wembley Stadium to win the Football League Cup for the second year running.
18 March: Three men are killed in an explosion at the Golborne colliery in Golborne, Greater Manchester.
22 March: Sir Richard Sykes, ambassador to the Netherlands, is shot dead by a member of the Provisional IRA in the Hague.
28 March: The Labour government loses a motion of confidence by just one vote, which forces a General Election.
29 March: Prime Minister James Callaghan announces a General Election will be held on 3 May. Having missed the chance to call one before the Winter of Discontent swayed public opinion against Labour, all the major opinion polls point towards a Conservative win, which would make Margaret Thatcher the first female Prime Minister.
30 March: Tory Northern Ireland spokesman Airey Neave is killed by an Irish National Liberation Army bomb in the car park of the House of Commons.
31 March: The Royal Navy withdraws from Malta.
4 April: 19-year-old bank worker Josephine Whitaker is murdered in Halifax. Police believe she is the 11th woman to be murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper.