Peter Brown ft Betty Wright ~ Dance With Me 1978 Disco Purrfection Version

For the week ending May 20 1978, "Dance With Me" reached the #31 position in its twelfth week forty one years ago today.
For the record there were two Peter Browns involved in the disco/dance scene who were each influential and popular throughout the disco era. The first Peter Brown is a New York based producer and songwriter most famous for Musique's "In The Bush", you know the disco porn tune "push push in the bush..." from 1978. The second Peter Brown is a multi-talented musician born July 11, 1953 who found fame on the dancefloor with "Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me" and the stellar "Dance With Me" a #4 Disco and #8 Hot100 hit in 1978. Peter's dad was an electronic engineer who exposed his son to new audio equipment including tape recorders that had more than one track meaning that there could be music on one track and the machine could record more instruments/vocals on the second one. As a teenager he chose the drums as his instrument of choice and included percussion once he heard and fell in love with the music of Santana, Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire. He began collaborating with Cory Wade who began to teach Brown how to be a producer. Taking demo tracks to the famed TK Records office in Hialeah, Florida they met with Henry Stone who was totally enamored of the demos and wanted to release them as is. Brown felt that the demos needed more work to completely involve his vision of how it should be and held out until Stone agreed to re-record the music. The song was "Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me" and it became the very first Gold 12" single ever making a big wave in the clubs peaking at #9. The follow up was "Dance With Me" radio ready disco pop tune that ruled the summer of 1978. It featured fellow TK recording artist Betty Wright who was part of the innovative promotional music clip. There was a 60 Minutes segment on how the song came to be that you can view here
   • 2 minutes with Peter Brown - Dance with me...  
The accolades followed fast and furiously with Billboard handing Brown the #1 New Male Artist and Top New Male Single Vocalist in 1978. Record World declared Brown the Outstanding New Performer, Top New Male Vocalist and Top Male Vocalist. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for best R&B Vocal Performance for the song "Dance With Me", but lost to George Benson's "On Broadway (Live)" single version. In demand, he recorded songs for movie soundtracks and prepared to release his second LP "Stargazer" but did not hit the top 10 disco until "Can't Be Love - Do It To Me Anyway" in 1980 peaking at #6 as a non album single. "Baby Gets High" reached the same peak. In 1983 his "Overnight Sensation" single tanked at #55 disco, but the next song he released "They Only Come Out At Night" became his most popular disco single ever in 1983 peaking at #1 and was followed up by the #2 charting of (Love Is Just) The Game. Did you know he wrote "Material Girl"? That song became inextricably connected to Madonna who made the song her own and has been unable to shake her image of being the "Material Girl". Sadly Peter left the music business after developing a serious case of tinnitus in the late 80's. After a long hiatus, he returned to the studio in 2018 to record his fifth LP "Boom" in which he did it all on an iMac computer. The man is virtually a music machine!