Stephanie Mills ~ Put Your Body In It 1979 Disco Purrfection Version

Stephanie Dorthea Mills is Brooklyn born and bred, who started singing gospel music as a child. At the age of 9, she won a part in the Broadway musical "Maggie Flynn" and at 11 won first prize for six straight weeks at the Amateur Night contest at the famed Apollo Theatre. She opened for the Isley Brothers that same year and got herself signed to Paramount Records in 1973 who issued her first hit, "I Knew It Was Love". She moved on to Motown Records, but it was not a match made in heaven and she left that label in 1976. Just before she left Motown, she starred in a black adaptation of "The Wizard Of Oz" playing Dorothy in the Broadway musical called "The Wiz". Her showstopping number "Home" made her a Broadway darling. Near the end of the disco juggernaut, she signed with 20th Century Fox records in 1979 and released the "Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin'" LP which produced the double sided #8 disco hit "Put Your Body In It"/"You Can Get Over". The album was a conscious effort to break her into the mainstream, and the title track peaked at #22 pop and #8 R&B. James Mtume and Reggie Lucas were the producers and writers who took the electronic disco beat and flavored it with R&B, soul and funk to create a solid body of work that led to a #12 R&B album and a peak of #22 on the US Billboard top 200 LP chart. The album was recorded at Sigma Sound studios in Philadelphia where MFSB made themselves a name. Hubert Eaves III handled the synthesizers for Stephanie's album and then made a name for himself a few years later when he collaborated with D-Train for the house classic "You're The One For Me" that stood out due to his synthesizer arrangement.