Interesting Story when it comes to Black Rock singers...Someone should forward thisto R & R hall of fame. Copy Paste link : http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/6580/ anti-divas/ The black female rock singer is invisible. By rock, I dont mean popular music, as the two terms are often injudiciously interchanged, but the loud, guitar and drum-driven energy of the actual genre. Though black musicrhythm and bluesis essentially the DNA of rock music, Donna Summer, who fronted a rock band in the late 1960s (The Crow), has often stated that were it not for disco, she would have steered towards a career in rock music. As disco retreated to the underground in the early 1980s, Summer released a rock-oriented album, The Wanderer. Rock-formatted radio was hesitant to embrace Summer, even though her songs were not stylistically dissimilar to the songs of white female rockers like Pat Benatar So black women in rock have existed, but have been by and large invisible, with the exception of the anomalous Tina Turner. Listen to "Running for cover" by Donna Summer. Yes, the same Donna Summer who, a year before this recording, rode the crest of the disco wave with Bad Girls. Behind her carefully created façade, Summer was as much a rocker as a disco queen. She was also the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Rock Performance, Female in 1980 ("Hot Stuff"). On her first release for Geffen, Summer covertly expressed her spiritual rebirth through rock on a number of tracks. When she growls, The promise in the dark / Is that the devils in the park on the self-penned Running for Cover, the Grammy for Hot Stuff, and her two subsequent nominations in the rock category, is validated.