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| Plan A, apparently. |
The Hit
Anita Ward was working as an elementary school teacher when she recorded her sultry, literal chart-topping single, “Ring My Bell” in 1979. After graduating from Rust University, majoring in Psychology, she had no intention of embarking on a music career, but, as Stereogum (helpfully!) noted in a 2020 entry in a series that shares the same theme as this series (Numbers Ones), a school administrator at Rust U. heard her audition for Godspell (I can just hear here on “Turn Back, Oh, Man”), and offered to become her manager. Said administrator put her in touch with Frederick Knight, a local celebrity in his own right, by way of his regional/Stax Records hit “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long.”
Knight had originally written “Ring My Bell” for Stacy Lattislaw, “an 11-year-old kiddie-R&B singer,” but he sexed up the lyrics for Ward, though Ward was, per Stereogum’s article, “a clean-living Christian girl.” [Ed. - Though, here, “sexed up” means loosely implying that sex is something that might happen when someone comes home from work.] It was the last song they recorded for Ward’s debut album, but it shot to No. 1 within two weeks. Ward even switched to substitute teaching just in case the single took off. And it very much did, hitting No. 1 in the U.S., the UK and Canada.
Another fun (probably) fact: “Ring My Bell” was the No. 1 single in America on the night of Chicago’s rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night, a detail that became the lede/nugget for Stereogum’s piece. To quote/contextualize in full:
“Disco was a form of underground music that had improbably risen up out of New York’s black and gay clubs to conquer the pop charts. It upended social norms, changed fashion and drugs, and moved the balance of music-business power away from the petty-aristocrat California singer-songwriters who’d been running things up until then. From a music-history standpoint, it’s possible to see disco as a great democratizing force, a push to turn pop music into something fun and silly and cheap and glamorous. When people like Chic’s Nile Rodgers describe Disco Demolition Night as a fascist rally, that’s what they’re talking about.”
For fans of podcasts, there’s a really good episode of You’re Wrong About on the same subject, for what it’s worth. Anita Ward does not make a cameo…
As a piece of music, it’s pure dance/disco, content with repetition - does that single-note pulse on the one ever let up? [Ed. - After the first verse, yes, it does…only to return around the third minute] - and even-keeled to a fault. It’s a song to get lost in, a mix of ecstatic and primal; a vehicle for the dance-floor. On the production side, it foregrounds the hooks, so you don’t really hear the rhythm, but, those backing vocals are one of your better hooks. It’s hard to believe something so hypnotic can only happen once for one artist…
The Rest of the Story
“When I see this, it's just the beginning of a world I never thought I'd be a part of.”
That came out of what can best be described as a “where are they know” piece posted to the website of Memphis, Tennessee station. Based on how short it is, I assume it’s a transcript from a local news segment catching up with a local legend/half-oddity. Related, treating Ward’s career as a footnote is neither unfair nor inaccurate.
Born in Memphis in 1957, Ward lived an entirely normal life until she went away to Rust University, and with no greater ambition than getting a higher education and landing a good job after. Rust’s choir was part of the draw for attending, and she did show up for that Godspell audition, but she only thought about music for the first time when someone else suggested she should - and, by all accounts, from non-nefarious motives. Still, her hit single happened and offers came in - e.g., the Merv Griffin Show and a spot in Wolfman Jack’s “The Midnight Special,” which recommended some further training:
“They flew in a dancer and others, including a guy from New York to vigorously work with me, showing me how to dance with parts of my body I didn’t even know I had.”
All the same, that pretty much sums it up. Ward recorded “Ring My Bell” for Knight’s label, Juana, and they had T.K. Productions for distribution, but that didn’t give her much of a push. The follow-up single from the same album, “Make Believe Lovers,” tripped on its way to the charts, and the calls from Merv Griffin, Wolfman Jack, or anyone on TV, dried up from there. Ward released a full album after that - Sweet Surrender, also in 1979, which landed a minor hit with “Don’t Drop My Love,” but that only climbed as high as No. 87. Stereogum faults Disco Demolition Night, as well as the zeitgeist around it, as a kind of global explainer for other disco acts trailing off mid-sentence, including Ward, but, y’know, things and sounds come to an end.
Ward’s music career dried up somewhat sharpish from there. She had a second act - a 1989 album titled Wherever There’s Love - but it had no domestic (i.e., U.S.) distribution and largely languished in the places where it did get distributed. In broad strokes, Anita Ward continued to teach, but the Action 5 News report updated her resume with her working at JC Penney. And, to be clear, I’m not shitting on that, not least because Ward seems to keep hanging on to jobs instead of careers, positions that let her check out if/when another singing gig calls her away. For instance, just ahead of a Goldmine Mag interview, she had an engagement on a cruise lined up, with Sister Sledge (you know this one) and Maxine Nightingale (“Lead Me On“, also not disco) lined up. For 2020. When COVID happened. Some are cursed, some are never blessed, etc.
About the Sampler
Because Anita Ward had a short career - and, for what it’s worth, I think I’ll see more of this going forward - I struggled to muster a Top 10. It also didn’t help that Spotify only had a re-release of her debut (which they titled Ring My Bell, instead of Songs of Love), and Sweet Surrender. Super fans of Ward’s sound can get a full (and endearingly personal) run-down of her catalog in the Goldmine Mag piece, but I wound up with a fairly uncomplicated selection based on the stuff I liked a little more than everything else I heard. And those are (besides the songs already linked to above):
From Ring My Bell/Songs of Love: “Someday We’ll Be Together,” “Cover Me,” the delightfully aching “If I Could Feel That Old Feeling Again,” “Spoiled by Your Love,” and the pained slow jam, “Can’t Nobody Love Me Like You Do.” The selection for Sweet Surrender comes from a different path - e.g., history, but also “Someday We’ll Be Together”....which brings me to a point about Ward's catalog, i.e., it repeats (dammit), so I'll just flag “Forever Love You More” and “Forever Green” from here.
As I listened to Anita Ward, the thing that stood out most was the comparatively high, bubbly quality of her voice. If you listen to (most) of what she did, it’s neither great nor awful: again, it’s music you dance to, something for that more or less intoxicated moment when the inspiration to hit the floor hits you, with neither embarrassment or an overdose of ambition. It’s about having fun, goddammit, something the attendees, celebrants, unwitting masochists of the Disco Demolition Night would have sorted out had they listened to more or less normal people.
Till the next one…which, as it turns out, will be something of a re-write.
Anita Ward was working as an elementary school teacher when she recorded her sultry, literal chart-topping single, “Ring My Bell” in 1979. After graduating from Rust University, majoring in Psychology, she had no intention of embarking on a music career, but, as Stereogum (helpfully!) noted in a 2020 entry in a series that shares the same theme as this series (Numbers Ones), a school administrator at Rust U. heard her audition for Godspell (I can just hear here on “Turn Back, Oh, Man”), and offered to become her manager. Said administrator put her in touch with Frederick Knight, a local celebrity in his own right, by way of his regional/Stax Records hit “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long.”
Knight had originally written “Ring My Bell” for Stacy Lattislaw, “an 11-year-old kiddie-R&B singer,” but he sexed up the lyrics for Ward, though Ward was, per Stereogum’s article, “a clean-living Christian girl.” [Ed. - Though, here, “sexed up” means loosely implying that sex is something that might happen when someone comes home from work.] It was the last song they recorded for Ward’s debut album, but it shot to No. 1 within two weeks. Ward even switched to substitute teaching just in case the single took off. And it very much did, hitting No. 1 in the U.S., the UK and Canada.
Another fun (probably) fact: “Ring My Bell” was the No. 1 single in America on the night of Chicago’s rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night, a detail that became the lede/nugget for Stereogum’s piece. To quote/contextualize in full:
“Disco was a form of underground music that had improbably risen up out of New York’s black and gay clubs to conquer the pop charts. It upended social norms, changed fashion and drugs, and moved the balance of music-business power away from the petty-aristocrat California singer-songwriters who’d been running things up until then. From a music-history standpoint, it’s possible to see disco as a great democratizing force, a push to turn pop music into something fun and silly and cheap and glamorous. When people like Chic’s Nile Rodgers describe Disco Demolition Night as a fascist rally, that’s what they’re talking about.”
For fans of podcasts, there’s a really good episode of You’re Wrong About on the same subject, for what it’s worth. Anita Ward does not make a cameo…
As a piece of music, it’s pure dance/disco, content with repetition - does that single-note pulse on the one ever let up? [Ed. - After the first verse, yes, it does…only to return around the third minute] - and even-keeled to a fault. It’s a song to get lost in, a mix of ecstatic and primal; a vehicle for the dance-floor. On the production side, it foregrounds the hooks, so you don’t really hear the rhythm, but, those backing vocals are one of your better hooks. It’s hard to believe something so hypnotic can only happen once for one artist…
The Rest of the Story
“When I see this, it's just the beginning of a world I never thought I'd be a part of.”
That came out of what can best be described as a “where are they know” piece posted to the website of Memphis, Tennessee station. Based on how short it is, I assume it’s a transcript from a local news segment catching up with a local legend/half-oddity. Related, treating Ward’s career as a footnote is neither unfair nor inaccurate.
Born in Memphis in 1957, Ward lived an entirely normal life until she went away to Rust University, and with no greater ambition than getting a higher education and landing a good job after. Rust’s choir was part of the draw for attending, and she did show up for that Godspell audition, but she only thought about music for the first time when someone else suggested she should - and, by all accounts, from non-nefarious motives. Still, her hit single happened and offers came in - e.g., the Merv Griffin Show and a spot in Wolfman Jack’s “The Midnight Special,” which recommended some further training:
“They flew in a dancer and others, including a guy from New York to vigorously work with me, showing me how to dance with parts of my body I didn’t even know I had.”
All the same, that pretty much sums it up. Ward recorded “Ring My Bell” for Knight’s label, Juana, and they had T.K. Productions for distribution, but that didn’t give her much of a push. The follow-up single from the same album, “Make Believe Lovers,” tripped on its way to the charts, and the calls from Merv Griffin, Wolfman Jack, or anyone on TV, dried up from there. Ward released a full album after that - Sweet Surrender, also in 1979, which landed a minor hit with “Don’t Drop My Love,” but that only climbed as high as No. 87. Stereogum faults Disco Demolition Night, as well as the zeitgeist around it, as a kind of global explainer for other disco acts trailing off mid-sentence, including Ward, but, y’know, things and sounds come to an end.
Ward’s music career dried up somewhat sharpish from there. She had a second act - a 1989 album titled Wherever There’s Love - but it had no domestic (i.e., U.S.) distribution and largely languished in the places where it did get distributed. In broad strokes, Anita Ward continued to teach, but the Action 5 News report updated her resume with her working at JC Penney. And, to be clear, I’m not shitting on that, not least because Ward seems to keep hanging on to jobs instead of careers, positions that let her check out if/when another singing gig calls her away. For instance, just ahead of a Goldmine Mag interview, she had an engagement on a cruise lined up, with Sister Sledge (you know this one) and Maxine Nightingale (“Lead Me On“, also not disco) lined up. For 2020. When COVID happened. Some are cursed, some are never blessed, etc.
About the Sampler
Because Anita Ward had a short career - and, for what it’s worth, I think I’ll see more of this going forward - I struggled to muster a Top 10. It also didn’t help that Spotify only had a re-release of her debut (which they titled Ring My Bell, instead of Songs of Love), and Sweet Surrender. Super fans of Ward’s sound can get a full (and endearingly personal) run-down of her catalog in the Goldmine Mag piece, but I wound up with a fairly uncomplicated selection based on the stuff I liked a little more than everything else I heard. And those are (besides the songs already linked to above):
From Ring My Bell/Songs of Love: “Someday We’ll Be Together,” “Cover Me,” the delightfully aching “If I Could Feel That Old Feeling Again,” “Spoiled by Your Love,” and the pained slow jam, “Can’t Nobody Love Me Like You Do.” The selection for Sweet Surrender comes from a different path - e.g., history, but also “Someday We’ll Be Together”....which brings me to a point about Ward's catalog, i.e., it repeats (dammit), so I'll just flag “Forever Love You More” and “Forever Green” from here.
As I listened to Anita Ward, the thing that stood out most was the comparatively high, bubbly quality of her voice. If you listen to (most) of what she did, it’s neither great nor awful: again, it’s music you dance to, something for that more or less intoxicated moment when the inspiration to hit the floor hits you, with neither embarrassment or an overdose of ambition. It’s about having fun, goddammit, something the attendees, celebrants, unwitting masochists of the Disco Demolition Night would have sorted out had they listened to more or less normal people.
Till the next one…which, as it turns out, will be something of a re-write.
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