Jimmy Ellis, a singer who died at age 74 after suffering from Alzheimer’s, was best known for one song. The band he led, the Trammps, had other hits in the US and UK when the Philadelphia International label’s richly orchestrated soul music slowly changed into disco, but Disco Inferno overshadowed them all.
When it was used in a nightclub scene in the movie Saturday Night Fever, the song had already done well on the US R&B chart (1977). The soundtrack album went on to sell more than 15 million copies. It was the best-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out. It was more than just a hit because of how well it did. When people started to look back on disco with nostalgia, this song came to stand for that time. Since then, Tina Turner has sung it, Madonna has sampled it, and Ricky Gervais hummed it when David Brent showed off his dancing skills on The Office.
Earl Young, the Trammps’ drummer, is credited with “inventing” the disco rhythm by emphasising the high-hat cymbal in a way that made it easier for DJs to mix tracks on which he played. However, the Trammps’ career began before disco, with which they became inextricably linked.
They got together in Philadelphia. It was the latest band Ellis had put together. He had been pursuing his musical dreams for more than ten years, first in his hometown of Rock Hill, South Carolina, and then in New Jersey, where he worked as a gardener and a chauffeur. Their first single, a cover of Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart came out in 1972. It showed that they were street-corner harmony singers influenced by doo-wop and part of the heavily orchestrated “Philadelphia sound,” which was about to overtake Motown as the most crucial force in black music. It was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but their next singles didn’t do as well, and their record label, Buddah, dropped them.
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Their self-titled 1975 album came out on a short-lived label that Young, Ronnie Baker, and Norman Harris started. Young, Baker, and Harris also made up a strong production team. One song, called Trammps Disco Theme, showed where the band would go next. That’s Where the Happy People Go, which came out the following year, didn’t have any ballads and was made for dancing. Both “Hold Back the Night” and “Title Song” were big hits.
But the Trammps’ best song was the one that was the title track of their next album, Disco Inferno. The way was written by their keyboard player Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey and Leroy Green. Like many discos, it was both a novelty record (it referred to the 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno) and a song with a lot more going on than its smooth, radio-friendly surface let on. Depending on who you ask, the phrase “burn, baby, burn” was made up by a soul DJ in the 1960s named Magnificent Montague or a Maoist activist named William Epton during the Harlem riots of 1964. In either case, the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965 brought it to the whole country’s attention in the United States.
Tom Moulton, the record producer who worked on the 10-minute track, said that he had set the noise reduction levels on the mixing desk wrong, giving the song a more powerful sound that went well with Ellis’s soaring lead vocal.
The Trammps’ time on the charts was short. A year after the soundtrack spent 24 weeks at the top of the US charts, their album The Whole World’s Dancing had difficulty getting to No. 184, even though Stevie Wonder played on it. It was their last time on the charts.
If the Trammps’ involvement with disco shortened how long they were on the charts, it made their live career last longer. Ellis toured with the band for the next 30 years until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2008. Two years later, he played with the bar for the last time in Atlantic City, where he had played in talent shows 50 years earlier.
He is survived by Beverly, the woman he has been married to for 46 years, their two children, Erika and Jimmy, and three brothers, one sister, and eight grandchildren.
Singer James Thomas Ellis was born on November 15, 1937, and died on March 8, 2012.
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