AMERICAN soul/disco singer Loleatta Holloway has died. The 64-year-old former Salsoul recording artiste died of heart failure

on Monday.

Holloway began singing gospel music with her mother in the Holloway Community Singers. She made her recording debut in 1971 with the track Rainbow 71 which was written by Curtis Mayfield and originally recorded by Gene Chandler.

She later signed with the Atlanta-based soul music label Aware, which was a subsidiary of the General Recording Corporation (GRC). Two albums were recorded for the label, namely 1973’s Loleatta and 1975’s Cry to Me.

After the Aware label was shut down, she was signed to Philadelphia’s Gold Mine label, a subsidiary of Salsoul Records. While with Gold Mine, Holloway stomped the disco charts with hits like Re-Light My Fire (featuring Dan Hartman), Love Sensation, We’re Getting Stronger (which Whitney Houston sampled in her 2009 comeback hit Million Dollar Bill), Hit and Run and the ballads Only You and Worn out Broken Heart. Both ballads are still popular here in Jamaica on the oldies circuit.

Just like her contemporaries, fellow soul singers from the 1970s Margie Josephs, Ruby Winters and Dorothy Moore, Holloway never managed to make that massive impact stateside. Her sole number one hit came with Marky Mark’s 1991 hit Good Vibrations which heavily sampled her 1981 disco hit Love Sensation.

Love Sensation was actually sampled on numerous occasions, most notably by Italian disco act Black Box, which repackaged the disco nugget into their 1989 global hit Ride On Time, the UK’s Top selling single for that year.

Holloway, however, was unaccredited for her vocals on the Black Box recording (Italian model Catherine Quinol was featured in the video lip-syncing to Holloway’s vocals), and she successfully sued the group.

Following the suit, her fortunes improved drastically with the success of the Marky Mark hit, giving her music a listening ear to a younger generation. She toured with Marky Mark to promote Good Vibrations and received full vocal credit on the track and a share of the royalties.

Her last studio album Love Sensation was released in 1981 however, Holloway continued to release singles up the time of her death. Loleatta Holloway: The Anthology (Salsoul) was released in 2005.

In recent years she visited the dance charts with hits including Dreaming, A Better World featuring disco singer Jocelyn Brown, What Goes Around featuring GTS, Shout it to the Top featuring Fire Island, Take Me Away featuring Capella and Gotta Be featuring Latin Swing.

Love Sensation has been remixed on several occasions and its most recent remix Love Sensation 2006 landed on several charts globally.

Holloway leaves behind four children and nine grandchildren.