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The Broadway Anthem That Became a Dance-Floor Declaration: How Gloria Gaynor Found ‘I Am What I Am’
The Broadway Anthem That Became a Dance-Floor Declaration: How Gloria Gaynor Found “I Am What I Am” In the spring of 1983, a middle-aged man in a gown stood in a pool of light at New York’s Palace Theatre and sang a song that would not stay in the theater. The show was “La Cage…
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Gloria Gaynor: The Survivor Behind the Anthem
Everybody knows the voice. For nearly fifty years, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” has been the soundtrack to breakups, recoveries, and second chances, sung in some twenty languages by people who may not know a thing about the woman singing it. But the anthem didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a woman who had…
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How Gloria Gaynor Invented the Nonstop Dance Mix: The Story Behind “Never Can Say Goodbye”
Before Gloria Gaynor became the voice of survival, she became the voice of the dance floor itself. Her debut album, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” released in January 1975, contains one of the boldest experiments in pop history: a full side of vinyl, nearly nineteen minutes long, with no breaks between the songs. Three tracks flow…
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The Untold Story of Gloria Gaynor: The B-Side Nobody Wanted That Became the World’s Anthem
Some songs sell millions of records. A rare few outlive their era, their genre, and even the singers who made them famous. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” belongs to that rare second category — an anthem that has comforted heartbroken teenagers, emboldened survivors of illness and violence, and filled dance floors in roughly twenty languages…