Born Brenda Shannon Greene in 1958 in Washington, D.C., she grew up in Brooklyn and attended New York University, majoring in accounting.
At the age of 20, she joined the New York Jazz Ensemble as a singer. While she was a member she met drummer Lenny White and sang with Brownstone,
which led to some recordings. Let the music play was issued on Emergency Records as a 12" single with Shannon listed as the artist in fall
1983. She was shocked at the sight of her name on the record. Produced by Mark Liggett and Chris Barbosa and written by Barbosa and Ed Chisolm,
the track introduced a new dance sound. The record became a monster dance-club hit and was picked up by Mirage Records, a subsidiary of
Atlantic Records, whose roster included dance-club favorites
The System. Her debut album Let the music play was issued in February
1984 and went No.1. Shannon followed that up with Give me tonight and My heart's divided. Do you wanna get away was the title of her second
Mirage album, issued in May 1985. Her third album, Love goes all the way, with tracks produced by Patrick Adams and Robbie Buchanan, was
released on Atlantic in October 1986 with the singles Dancin and Prove me right. Several factors probably lead to Shannon's short-lived record
career. The closing of Emergency Records, some litigation surrounding her first single, the decline of dance-oriented radio stations and
the loss of airtime of club-DJ remixes on mainstream stations that was the initial springboard for her success. Nevertheless, Shannon
appeared on a 1999 segment of VH1's Where are they now, vowing to return to the top of the charts; the following spring she released
the album The best is yet to come.
