Donna Summer is back — and still heating up dance floors

"I'm glad to be busy again. I was getting bored," says Donna Summer.

Despite being nearly ubiquitous for much of the 1970s and '80s, "Queen of Disco" Donna Summer was missing in action for nearly 17 years before she emerged two years ago with Crayon, her first album of new original material since 1991's Mistaken Identity.

"I like to do music, but then I almost have to shut the whole thing down because if I stay in music mode, I can't get anything else done," Summer says of her long break, which she partly used to raise her three daughters. "If I don't take a break, I'm looking for pieces of paper, writing down pieces of songs, and I'm generally running around like a madwoman. I just have to shut it down and say I'm not going to do this right now. I'm going to focus on other things in my life like my health or writing a book. Let's travel. Let's do something else."

"I'm glad to be busy again. I was getting bored," says Donna Summer.

Of course, Summer was never entirely away from the entertainment industry. In 2003, she published her autobiography, "Ordinary Girl: The Journey." And over the long "hiatus" she released a handful of singles, including "Carry On," which re-teamed her with her '70s producer, Giorgio Moroder. She also made a few high-profile concert appearances such as last year's performance at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway.

But with the release of Crayon, which placed three singles at the top of the Billboard dance chart, and now a new single, "To Paris With Love," Summer, who performs Saturday at the Memphis Botanic Garden as part of the Live at the Garden concert series, has stepped back into the limelight for good.

"I'm glad to be busy again. I was getting bored," says Summer, 61, whose three daughters, including actress Brooklyn Sudano and musician Amanda Ramirez of the husband-wife duo Johnnyswim, are now grown.

Summer never planned to become an international dance diva. Originally from Boston, her earliest musical influence was gospel great Mahalia Jackson. (In 1993, Summer released her first gospel record, the holiday collection Christmas Spirit.) And as a young adult, she envisioned herself singing rock music, though in the early 1970s she could find no takers for an African-American female rock singer.

"I think my voice lent itself to that kind of music very well," says Summer who finally got to try her hand at rock with 1979's "Hot Stuff," and got her revenge by becoming the first woman and the first African-American to win a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance. "I could belt, and I just liked the energy of rock-and-roll music. I just thought it was a good place for me."

After being turned down for a role in the original production of "Hair," however, Summer's first professional break came in Europe, where she lived for several years, performing in stage productions and releasing a few pop singles. In 1974, she first teamed with Moroder and his partner, Pete Bellotte. Their first collaboration was a standard folk-rock effort, but the next year Summer came to them with an idea for a song called "Love To Love You Baby."

The track, which Moroder and Bellotte cast in the then-burgeoning disco sound, featured Summer moaning and groaning suggestively and became a worldwide smash. The string of dance hits that followed, including "I Feel Love" and "Last Dance," branded Summer as the "Queen of Disco."

Thirty years later, Summer is still filling dance floors. The techno-influenced "To Paris With Love," which comes on an EP with seven different remixes, started as a song she wrote especially for her friends at Louis Vuitton before it got picked up by deejays around the world.

"It just started to snowball," Summer says of the viral nature of the song's success. "It was never meant for release. All these deejays started playing it, and I didn't even know about it. And now it's on iTunes, and its being picked up all over the world. I couldn't have made that happen if I was pushing that myself."

Donna Summer

Saturday at Memphis Botanic Garden, 750 Cherry Road. Gates open at 6:30 p.m.; show starts at 8:30. Tickets: $49.75, available through Ticketmaster. For more information, call 636-4107, or visit liveatthegarden.com.

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