'Disco Inferno' singer Jimmy Ellis of Rock Hill dies at 74

'Disco Inferno' singer Jimmy Ellis of Rock Hill dies at 74

The end came silently Thursday morning for Jimmy Ellis. But the life, before death at age 74, was never quiet. Jimmy Ellis burned that mother down.

James T. Ellis, "Jimmy," died Thursday, but the song "Disco Inferno" will live forever.

The silent killer, Alzheimer’s, with no regard for greatness that will never be quieted or a song that changed the world, needs no noise for its desperate deed. But in a lifetime that lasted 74 years until Thursday, there was always sound around Jimmy Ellis who grew up in a shotgun shack on Pond Street in Rock Hill’s Crawford Road neighborhood. Songs sung driving a school bus at age 16, winning talent shows and at roadhouses, songs to his kids and grandkids, in churches and arenas and on television and in movies. And the sound above all sounds, words from deep in Ellis’s soul down there way below the diaphragm where the magic lives, that will last until the world ends.

“‘Burn that mother down!’” said Johnny Ellis, Jimmy Ellis’s younger brother. “ ‘Burn, baby burn.’ Doesn’t matter where you go, who they are, everybody knows when they hear the words ‘Burn that mother down’ and ‘ burn, baby burn’ that the song is Disco Inferno. And the man with that voice who sang that song was Jimmy Ellis.”

That song, "Disco Inferno," turned The Trammps - the band Jimmy Ellis fronted, and its silver-voiced singer from entertainers into plain - out American cultural icons. The song was featured in the "Saturday Night Fever" movie in 1977, and the subsequent soundtrack that sold an astounding 15 million copies as it stayed atop the charts for half a year. In 1978, "Disco Inferno" as a single became for a while the Number One dance song in America, and thus, the world.


http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/03/08/3804499/singer-of-disco-inferno-jimmy.html