Last Dance (Donna Summer song)

Summer has a role in the 1978 film Thank God It's Friday as Nicole Sims, an aspiring singer who brings an instrumental track of "Last Dance" to a discothèque in hopes the disc jockey will play it and allow her to sing the song for her fellow patrons; after refusing through most of the film the disc jockey eventually obliges Sims and her performance causes a big sensation.

According to the song's arranger Bob Esty, Paul Jabara had locked Summer in a Puerto Rico hotel bathroom and forced her to listen to a cassette of him singing a rough version of "Last Dance". Summer liked it and Jabara asked Esty to work with him on an arrangement for the singer to make her recording. Esty recalls:

I changed some of the chords and extended the 'hook' to repeat three times to finish the last phrase of the chorus. I also added a bridge to build to a climax and suggested a ballad intro à la "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and another ballad in the middle of the song building again to a high note for the last chorus ending. To our knowledge, this had never been done in a disco track. ..We did the piano/vocal with Donna and me of the full version including the two ballad sections and the ending in one 'pass'... I recorded the full track in one day, rhythm in the morning, horns and strings during the day. That same night, Giorgio Moroder recorded Donna's vocal exactly as she sang the demo, in two takes, and banning me from attending the session. In spite of the fact Giorgio didn't like the song and didn't want Donna to sing in a full voice style, I thought I would be at least credited for co-producing the track and co-writing the song with Paul. He ultimately took credit for it. And Paul Jabara took the Oscar. I learned a bitter lesson from that.

— Bob Esty[3]

"Last Dance" was also one of the first disco songs to feature slow tempo parts: it starts off as a ballad; the full-length version on the film's soundtrack also has a slow part in the middle. The middle part was edited out for the 7-inch single format. Record World said of the song that "Its first half is a quiet ballad (which Summer sings well); it winds up with a hot, swirling disco finish."[4] The versions found on most greatest hits albums is either the original 7-inch single version (3:18) or the slightly longer and remixed version from the 1979 album On The Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2 (4:56). "Last Dance" started a trend for Summer as some of her following hits also had a ballad-like intro before speeding up the tempo. On David Foster's "The Hitman Returns" DVD release, Foster introduces the song by relating a story to Summer. When he played on the session in 1978, Foster thought the producer's suggestion to start the song as a ballad and change into a faster tempo was "the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life, but we did it."

"Last Dance" won Jabara a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song, an Academy Award[1] and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song that same year. The song won Summer at the American Music Awards prizes for Favorite Disco Single and Favorite Female Disco Artist. She would also win the Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. With a number-three peak on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of August 12, 1978, "Last Dance" became Summer's third US top-ten hit after "Love to Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love" and almost matched the number-two hit "Love to Love You Baby" as Summer's best-charting single at that time. "Last Dance" also afforded the singer a number-five hit on the Hot Soul Singles chart and topped Billboard's National Disco Action Top 30 for six weeks, eventually being ranked as the number-one disco hit of 1978. Certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on July 19, 1978, for sales of a million copies in the United States, "Last Dance" marked a downturn in Summer's chart fortunes in the United Kingdom where she'd previously had more chart impact than in the States with "Last Dance"'s UK chart peak being at number 51; Summer would return to the UK top-ten – at number five – with her follow-up single "MacArthur Park" [1] a single which afforded Summer her first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100. "Last Dance" was ranked number ten out of the Top 76 songs of the 1970s by internet radio station WDDF Radio in their 2016 countdown.[5]

• The song is frequently used by many radio stations as their last song before changing formats, being used by many "Jammin' Oldies" stations in the US before the downfall of the format early in the decade of the 2000s. It was also used as the last song on the SiriusXM channel The Strobe in October 2010. On June 6, 2016 at 12 p.m., classic hits station KOSF in San Francisco, California played "Last Dance" before flipping from "Big 103.7" to 1980s hits as "iHeart 80s at 103.7".[19]

• List of number-one dance singles of 1978 (U.S.)

• Donna Summer - Last Dance on YouTube