Ring My Bell

Back when telephones had actual bells, if you asked someone to "ring my bell," it meant to give that person a call. Or it could refer to getting down and dirty in the bedroom. The lyric implies the latter, with Anita Ward telling her man the night is young and "full of possibilities," and letting him know he can ring her bell. In the opening line, she says, "I'm glad you're home," so he would have no need to call her, right? Despite the evidence, Ward has always stayed on script in denying there is any sexual connotation in the song. "I've had people ask me many times, 'What does that song really mean?'" She told the Memphis Downtowner in 2018. "And I said, 'Whatever you want it to mean.' But it was just a simple love song. Totally innocent."

This disco classic was written by Ward's producer, Frederick Knight, known for his 1972 hit "I've Been Lonely For So Long." He originally intended it for 11-year-old Stacy Lattisaw, but when she signed with a different label, Ward was asked to sing it instead. She disliked the song and only recorded it as Frederick Knight insisted they needed another dance number on the album. According to Knight, it was originally meant to be "a teenybopper type of song about kids talking on the telephone," which was appropriate for Lattisaw's juvenile audience but not suitable for the grown-up disco crowd. With Ward as his new inspiration, Knight overhauled the song with sexy lyrics and a dance beat. In the song, Ward welcomes her man home and invites him to ring her bell - an obvious euphemism for getting in on. But Knight insisted his intentions were wholesome. "Anita is a very clean-cut person," he told Billboard magazine, "so I went to great pains being picky about lyric content. We're trying to build a respectable image for her. The lyric talks about an everyday situation - it's nothing you'd be ashamed of in front of your kids."

This was one of the first hit songs to feature a synthesized drum. The hook was the synthesized drum of Frederick Knight, which produced a sound that became copied by many other disco records. Carl Marsh is also credited for his synthesizer work on the album.