DJDiscoCat's video: Melba Moore You Stepped Into My Life 1978 Disco Purrfection Version

Melba Moore was born Beatrice Hill on October 29, 1945 into a musical family where her father Teddy Hill was a big band leader and her mother Bonnie Davis (née Gertrude Melba Smith) was a professional singer. That relationship ended and Bonnie remarried to Clem Moorman who played piano and sang. The two worked together and left Melba in the care of an abusive nanny. As a teen, her family moved to New Jersey and she attended a high school for the performing arts, majored in music education and began teaching. Soon the call of performing took precedence and she auditioned for the musical "Hair" in 1968, winning the part and spent 18 months there before moving on to "Purlie" for which she recorded her performance for The original cast recording in 1970. 1972 saw her get her own TV show "Melba Moore-Clifton Davis Show and never stopped performing in clubs. She was releasing about an album a year, then was signed to Buddah Records (Neil Bogart) for four albums. Her first disco hit was "This Is It" from 1976 and peaked at . She switched labels to Epic and set about recording her debut for the label. Entitled "Melba" she worked hard to get music that would better represent what was going on radio at the time and chose "You Stepped Into My Life" from the Bee Gees catalog. "You Stepped Into My Life" was a Bee Gees written recording that was an album track on their 1976 opus "Children Of The World" and was the B side of "Love So Right" the second single issued from that LP. The song peaked at Disco, her best showing until 1982's "Love's Comin' At Ya" that spent four weeks at Disco. It entered the Hot100 on January 20, 1979 at peaking at spending seven weeks on the survey. She maintained appearances on that chart all the way into the 90's with "Do You Really Want My Love" that peaked at . Melba gave back to the community by establishing the Melba Moore Foundation for Children, a nonprofit organization that funds a variety of charities for needy youth. In 1990 she released "Lift Every Voice and Sing". Moore explained in the Detroit Free Press that she sees her work with children's charities as "God's will" and added, "He said, 'If you love me, feed my sheep.' I think each of us has a calling and if each of us does our little part, our life is worthwhile. I want my life to be worth something."