FYI, I worked on this with Rebecca McLaughlin, so apologies if ours seem similar.
First and foremost, Google’s Ngram Viewer is kind of useless when it comes to the word Disco. This is mostly due to the fact disco is apparently counts as a prefix, so the use of the ‘word’ can be traced easily back to the 1800s in words such as ‘discomfort’ and a bunch of other French sounding words that aren’t really used that often in the modern age(silly French people(hopefully that wasn’t offensive)).
A quick search for the history revealed a very general explanation(thanks Wikipedia) in the fact that Disco arrives from the word discotheque, another word frequently used to describe certain styles of nightclub. When plugged into Google’s Ngram, the results were a lot more helpful, and revealed the term starting gaining substantial use in the 50s, and has steadily increased up to today. The real question in my search, is to find around what time period that Discotheque(as in the nightclub) started being more popularly used to describe music along with being shortened to the term disco.
By EARL C GOTTSCHALK JR Staff Reporter of THE WALL,STREET JOURNAL. (1979, Oct 22). Disco-music craze seems to be fading; record makers glad. Wall Street Journal (1923 – Current File) Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/134362064?accountid=14541
In the above source, Earl seems to make a pretty strong case about the fading nature of Disco. At the end of the 1970s, this isn’t entirely surprising, and it’s pretty accurate as Wikipedia brings up the point that true to it, Disco in mass didn’t really thrive in the 80s. With this information we can put a relative end date to the fanaticism of disco fever. Again, the real challenge is nailing down when it might have began outside of its prefixed nature.
Savoy, M. (1968, Jun 25). Socialites take disco spin at newly opened club john. Los Angeles Times (1923-1995) Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/155981787?accountid=14541
This Newspaper provides another addition to the term Discotheque, and to be fair it describes the type of club that would play disco music. To quote: “Postage stamp floors, loud music, and jammed tables”. As far as I know, this seems to be the earliest accurate form of reporting on ‘disco music’ that the database, ProQuest, seems to provide.
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