Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive (Sing Me Back Home Productions, Storyville Entertainment, Lifetime Television, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, February 8) my husband Charles and I watched Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive, a quite compelling 2023 documentary on the life and (mostly hard) times of singer Gloria Gaynor. It was being shown on Lifetime as a supplement to a 2025 dramatized film about Gaynor, similarly titled I Will Survive: The Gloria Gaynor Story, with Joaquina Kalukango playing her and Francesca Bianchi as Gaynor’s long-time manager, personal assistant and overall factotum, Stephanie Gold. Gloria Gaynor was born Gloria Fowles in Newark, New Jersey on September 7, 1943. She was one of six children, and her father, Daniel Fowles, left the family when Gloria was 10. She was sexually molested at least twice, by one of her mother’s boyfriends at 13 and by a step-godparent at 17. Gloria grew up with music in her home – her mom listened to such Black jazz greats as Nat “King” Cole and Sarah Vaughan – and her brothers formed a gospel quartette but wouldn’t let her sing with them because she was a girl. The family moved to a housing project in 1960, Gaynor graduated from South Side High School in 1961, and on the strength of a neighbor’s recommendation got a job singing in a small club. In the 1960’s she joined a band called the Soul Satisfiers (a secular rather than a gospel group, despite the religious connotations in the name), and later she became lead singer for a group called City Life whose bassist, Tony Tarsia, was interviewed. In 1973 Gaynor got her first recording contract with Clive Davis at Columbia Records and released a single, “Honey Bee,” but shortly thereafter Davis was fired from Columbia and her record went nowhere. She got her big break when MGM Records signed her in 1975 and put out an album in which the first side was “Honey Bee” and covers of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” and the Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).” The songs played without any breaks for 17 minutes, which made the record ideal for plays in the burgeoning disco scene. MGM subsequently severed “Never Can Say Goodbye” and edited it for release as a single, and it got radio play and boosted Gaynor’s career.

Gaynor went on tour in support of her record and hired a group of three singing sisters, the Simon Sisters, to be her opening act. That introduced her to Linwood Simon, the Simon Sisters’ brother, whom she started dating and eventually married in 1979. Gaynor was one artist who was able to have hit records due to getting them played in discos even though radio stations were a tougher nut to crack. She was about to lose her MGM contract when the label was taken over by the German Polydor company, which hired a new president from Britain to run it. He wanted Gaynor to record a song called “Substitute,” first released by The Righteous Brothers in 1965 and in 1977 re-recorded by an all-female band from South Africa called Clout. The new president had managed to push Clout’s version of “Substitute” to the top of the British charts and he thought he could do the same in the U.S. with an American artist like Gaynor. But Gaynor was far more interested in the “B”-side of the record, a song about female empowerment by two white male writers, Freddie Perren and Dino Fakaris, called “I Will Survive.” When the record label refused to make “I Will Survive” the “A”-side or promote it at all, Gaynor took it upon herself. She had acetate dubs of “I Will Survive” made and given to D.J.’s at discos. The disco crowd loved the song and it became a huge hit in spite of the record company’s indifference. Ironically, Gaynor recorded “I Will Survive” while in intense physical pain due to an accident she’d had on stage at the Beacon Theatre in New York on March 12, 1978. She tripped over a monitor speaker on stage, fell and completed the show but woke the next morning in excruciating pain. The huge success of “I Will Survive” made Gaynor a star and thrust both her and her husband into the middle of the disco scene at the height of its drug-induced craziness. Gaynor had been an occasional drinker and pot smoker, but she recalled that when she tried cocaine for the first time she got slammed with an intense sensation which she interpreted as a sign from God not to go there with that drug.

Alas, her husband didn’t get the message; he took to the party scene like the proverbial duck to water, and eventually he outfitted the basement of their home with a secret entrance through the garage so he could come in and out and turn the basement into a private mancave she couldn’t enter – especially when she came home from a tour and found he’d changed the locks so she literally couldn’t get into the basement of her own home. In 1979, with the disco backlash in full swing, Gaynor’s career went into free fall and Linwood Simon started booking her in Europe, where disco was still popular even though the craze had essentially evaporated in the U.S. Ultimately Gaynor’s gigs started getting tackier, until she was sent out without a live band, just a CD of recorded accompaniment played behind her as she sang. Though Linwood Simon at least didn’t subject her to the kind of physical abuse Tina Turner received at the hands of her then-husband Ike, his casual indifference was just as bad. Gaynor said during the documentary that the final straw was when she was feeling especially sick and asked him to drive her to an emergency room – and he refused. Gaynor would slowly claw her way back to recognition as various movies and TV shows revisited the disco era and hired her to be its living incarnation and to sing “I Will Survive.” Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive chronicled her life with a “spine” of her recording sessions for her first gospel album, Testimony. She began the sessions for this in 2015 but didn’t complete the record for four years. Gaynor paid for the recording sessions herself, working with producer Christopher Stevens in Nashville, Tennessee. At first they recorded together in small studios and then hired RCA Victor’s Studio A, where Elvis Presley and RCA’s major country artists had made their hits, for a round of sessions with F. Reid Shippen. Shippen was a believer in doing so-called “studio live” records, made in single takes with minimal editing and with all the musicians present in the studio at the same time. Astonishingly, though Gaynor had already made 19 albums by the time she worked with Shippen on Testimony, she’d never made a record that way; all her previous sessions had been with her adding vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks.

Gaynor and her manager, Stephanie Gold (a white woman who’s almost omnipresent in the documentary), also had trouble finding a record company willing to release her album. Jackie Portillo, president of the American Gospel Association, suggested to her that she recruit guest stars to sing with her on the record in hopes this would raise the profile of the project and get a label to take it on. Gaynor and Gold first reached out to Bart Millard, singer and songwriter for the gospel group MercyMe, and he contributed a song called “Singing Over Me.” Then Gaynor and Gold were able to get white gospel star Jason Crabb to sing it with her as a duet. After that they got an even bigger gospel name, Black singer Yolanda Adams, to record a song with Gaynor called “Talkin’ ‘Bout Jesus.” But work on the project was halted in 2018 when Gaynor’s old back injuries became so severe she literally lost the ability to walk. Fortunately a quite remarkable surgeon named Dr. Hooman Melamed agreed to operate on her, though he warned her she would be in the hospital for three months and the recovery would be long and painful. Luckily Gaynor went through the operations and resumed work on Testimony – including a beautiful vocal quartet version of Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” with Crabb, Millard and Mike Farris – and was able to get it released by the Gaither Music Group, a small company headed by a husband-and-wife gospel duet. Testimony won a Grammy Award for Best Roots Gospel Album in 2020, giving Gaynor another award besides the one she’d won all those years before for “I Will Survive.” The film ends with Gaynor continuing her career in her early 80’s, and it contains a fascinating sequence of her visiting the Luis Vives elementary school in Valencia, Spain. When the school nearly went out of business, the students kept it going with a campaign featuring them singing a Spanish-language version of “I Will Survive.” While it’s grimly ironic that the woman who sang a sort of ultimate anthem of feminine empowerment got trapped in a 25-year marriage to a singularly exploitative man and only later got free of him, I Will Survive is a remarkable tribute to one of the greatest singers of our (or all) time, and one who has indeed not only survived but thrived and prospered.