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 end“‘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.
The refrain “Burn, baby burn” sung throughout that song, in the background and flowing like lava, hot and burning just like the words, is unforgettable and will surely last as long as there is music on the face of the earth. It is not so much a chorus as a demand, a magical spell, or just plain fated destiny. The song sung by Jimmy Ellis of Rock Hill, a voice that careens over mountains and screams through valleys with “Saaaatisfaction -(and in the background the Trammps singing ooh-ooh-ooh) came in a chain reaction,” remains, 35 years later, iconic in not just music, but popular culture and life.
“The song Disco Inferno remains a big favorite in Europe to this day, and is played here and everywhere,” said Ellis’s wife of 46 years, Beverly. “Disco Inferno? The whole world knows the words.”The song was played at discos around the globe - and still is. Disco Inferno is in movies and on TV shows and commercials. Jimmy Ellis, with that song, became plainly, immortal.“It does not matter where you go in the world and I been all over this world playing music, Disco Inferno is being played somewhere on a radio or in a mall or on a train or a plane,” said Johnnie “Boggie” King, another legendary musician who grew up with the Ellis brothers playing music together. “To lose Ellis is to lose a legend. The song and our Ellis - we call him Ellis, not Jimmy - is around somewhere. The cat just went to the mountaintop with that one song - and he never come back down.”Even though Ellis and the Trammps had been touring for years before 1978, and had other songs and a bunch of albums, it was Disco Inferno that turned Ellis into a household voice.“We had to move because when that song got huge, it was the biggest thing in the country,” said Erika Stinson, 42, the younger of Ellis’s two children. “People just showed up at the house. It was unbelievable. All of a sudden here I am a little girl going to school and my father is leaving on tour and he is dropping me off at school in a limousine. I didn’t think it was strange that Stevie Wonder came over to see us. It was no biggie that my father was tight with the Bee Gees. The whole world knew the song. And it still does.”
