the very first disco song???

[djsonic]

Originally Posted by mixtape

what is the very first disco song??? In my opinion it would be possibly the temptations or james brown.

what about "The Electric Indian" songs? sounds like salsouls orchestra

[Paulo]

Originally Posted by JussiK

...Co-Co by The Sweet comes close...now there's another eurodisco prototype along with Sugar Me by Lynsey dePaul....

I guess all these pop songs right before the birth of Disco were big everywhere.

I had forgotten CO-CO by The Sweet. It played a lot on the radio in 1971. There was one brazilian cover version of this song with emphasis on percussion.... as well as 2 covers of the song Pop Concerto Show by awful studio carbon-copy female singers, but with all the percussion breaks.

Even Soul Makossa was covered more than once.

[transairn]

Originally Posted by mixtape

what is the very first disco song??? In my opinion it would be possibly the temptations or james brown.

Kiss - I Was Made For Lovin' You !!!! no?

[Disco Funk]

Originally Posted by Paulo

I guess all these pop songs right before the birth of Disco were big everywhere.

I had forgotten CO-CO by The Sweet. It played a lot on the radio in 1971. There was one brazilian cover version of this song with emphasis on percussion.... as well as 2 covers of the song Pop Concerto Show by awful studio carbon-copy female singers, but with all the percussion breaks.

Even Soul Makossa was covered more than once.

Hmmm....if those pop songs are going to be considered early forms of Disco, then Paul McCartney's tracks from 1970 (Momma Miss America) and 1971 (Monkberry Moon Delight) need to be put in there too!

Disco Funk

[Videoskooter]

OMG, R U guys still discussing this

[remicks]

Originally Posted by Disco Funk

Hmmm....if those pop songs are going to be considered early forms of Disco, then Paul McCartney's tracks from 1970 (Momma Miss America) and 1971 (Monkberry Moon Delight) need to be put in there too!

Disco Funk

OK MOMMA MISS AMERICA has a most interesting predisco funk type groove .... has anyone tried mixing this with The Stones MISS YOU ??



Not as convinced about the dance scene impact the ompa ompa sound used on MONKBERRRY MOON DELIGHT had :

I'd mix it into this :



*****

[Disco Funk]

Originally Posted by remicks

OK MOMMA MISS AMERICA has a most interesting predisco funk type groove .... has anyone tried mixing this with The Stones MISS YOU ??



Not as convinced about the dance scene impact the ompa ompa sound used on MONKBERRRY MOON DELIGHT had :

I'd mix it into this :
*****

Yeah, that Three Dog Night and the Monkberry Moon Delight (hey that rhymes) tracks would definitely mix well into each other. :)

I haven't tried mixing Momma Miss America and Miss You. Does it work really well? Can you believe that Paul's first solo LP (the one with Momma Miss America, and other tracks like Maybe I'm Amazed and Kreen Akrore) is just Paul all by himself! And Band on The Run, his first really big record after leaving the Beatles, was just him, Denny Laine and Linda? Denny's contribution would have been guitar and keyboards, whereas Linda's would have been vocals only. The rest was all Paul, minus strings, brass or woodwinds, of course!

Disco Funk

[SUPERGONZO]

I recently was having this discussion with some friends of mine, and being that I have a collection of some 35,000 45's, I went back and browsed a bit.

IMHO

Shaft...Issac Hayes.....was great but not disco. Neither was any of the other stuff before 1971. Soul YES....Funk....YES....Disco....NO

And the question of what was first is certainly a grey area, but lets look at the hits.

Soul Makossa... I actually heard this song in the very early summer of 1972, while in Africa. and then it became a hit when I had gotten back to the US later that summer. I didn't consider it disco and I don't think anyone else thought it was either. Although it certainly has some of the qualities of later disco hits.

Love Train.....O' Jays....really great song but Disco?? The problem here is that the line was blurring a bit and a new faster sound was coming to Soul and Funk...but is this Disco??? I don't think so.

April 1973.....Barry White....I'm Gonna love you just a little more... Disco?? Sexy Soul certainly

October 1973....Barry White.... Never Never gonna give you up...sounding more disco-like to me, almost there

December 1973...Love Unlimited Orchestra (Barry White).....Love's Theme.... this sounds pretty Disco, and was a number 1 hit

March 1974......MFSB....TSOP...sometimes known as the "Soul Train" song
Big #1 hit....Disco...could be??

April 1974.....Kool and the Gang...Hollywood Swinging.......Funk/Soul...but danceable. hmmm?? Disco??

May 1974...Hughs Corp...Rock The Boat........Claimed as 1st Disco record, but certainly not, and doesn't really sound all that Disco to me, good pop record though.

June 1974...George McCrae....Rock your Baby......Written by young Harry Casey...otherwise known as KC of KC and the sunshine band. Definitely Disco...No Doubt about it... Coming just 2 weeks after the above song.

Many others start to follow.

If I had to pick one it would be Love's Theme....by Barry White...especially if he wrote that alot earlier than 1973.

If you don't care for instrumentals then My pick is Rock your Baby.....

Either way Barry White and KC have alot of explaining to do!
Ok one of them does.

[Paulo]

Originally Posted by Disco Funk

Hmmm....if those pop songs are going to be considered early forms of Disco, then Paul McCartney's tracks from 1970 (Momma Miss America) and 1971 (Monkberry Moon Delight) need to be put in there too! Disco Funk

Nowhere in my post it is written that CO-CO by The Sweet or POP CONCERTO SHOW by Pop Concerto Orchestra are early forms of disco.

If you read carefully it is written that:
"I guess all these pop songs right before the birth of Disco were big everywhere. I had forgotten CO-CO by The Sweet. It played a lot on the radio in 1971. There was one brazilian cover version of this song with emphasis on percussion.... as well as 2 covers of the song Pop Concerto Show by awful studio carbon-copy female singers, but with all the percussion breaks."

I was talking to Jussi about early 70's songs which were covered by brazilian acts. But I didn't say that they were early forms of disco... On the other hand, I think those songs (which had percussion breaks) may have led to the birth of disco-music.

I said it before, but I say again what I think:

From everything that I saw / heard / read, I came to the conclusion that in the early 70s there were a lot of musical elements spread in a variety of POP and SOUL songs that when grouped together, gave birth to DISCO as a separate style.

Take for instance, SHAFT.
Is it disco? YES. NO. YES. NO. YES. NO.

But SHAFT has a lot of these musical elements which were fundamental for the appearance of the disco sound... like:

1) The way the strings are arranged and the way they sound
2) Wah-wah guitar
3) Fluterry female background vocals
4) A steady 4/4 rythm (from the middle of the song onwards)
5) Brass

Is SHAFT soul ? YES.
Is SHAFT disco ? ALMOST.
If it had a kick drum on it, you would have had the very first disco song ever.

What's really important is that SHAFT is placed in the watershed line of a time when SOUL was givin birth to DISCO, in a way that MOONKBERRY MOON DELIGHT and MOMMA MISS AMERICA could never be, because these 2 songs have absolutely none of the musical elements which would define DISCO as a form of music.

The same could apply to POP CONCERTO SHOW. Is it disco?
Absolutely not!
But it has a percussion break in the middle of it which is commonly found on the early disco songs.

All these elements form the roots of disco-music.

IMHO I would say (without fear of sounding totally ridiculous) that SHAFT (Isaac Hayes), K-JEE (The Nightliters) and ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS (First Choice) are closer to disco than to soul... what makes of them early forms of disco. Now... that I really said.

[markydefad]

Let's hear it for the boy, let's give PAULO a hand!!!

Great post! My sentiments exactly.

Between Sly & the Family Stone & Barry White--stands the link of Isaac Hayes' great "Theme From Shaft"...paving the way for Orchestral Soul which became Disco.....