House music was created in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Black DJs and producers in Chicago, for dance floors that were mostly Black and Latino and mostly gay, with a closely linked scene in New York. I make progressive house and trance, which both descend from that music, so I want to set out who built it, with names and dates.
The rooms where it started
The Warehouse opened at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago in 1977 under Robert Williams. Its musical director was Frankie Knuckles, who had moved from New York to take the job. The crowd was primarily gay Black and Latino men, and the parties ran from midnight on Saturday to midday on Sunday. Knuckles stayed until late 1982. In 1983 the club’s owners opened the Music Box, where Ron Hardy played harder and faster, and where Chicago producers such as Marshall Jefferson, Larry Heard and DJ Pierre first tried out their tracks.
Knuckles came out of New York’s Black gay club world. He and Larry Levan had been close friends since their teens in Harlem’s ball scene, and both started DJing at the Continental Baths. Levan went on to a ten-year residency at the Paradise Garage at 84 King Street in Manhattan, a members’ club that served no alcohol and often ran past 10 in the morning. The soulful style he played there is where the word “garage” comes from.
The timing matters. On July 12, 1979, a Chicago radio DJ blew up a pile of disco records between games at Comiskey Park, an event remembered as Disco Demolition Night. Its organizer has always denied prejudice, but critics at the time and historians since have read the “disco sucks” backlash as hostility toward music rooted in Black, Latino and gay clubs. In the same city, those clubs kept dancing. Knuckles later called house “disco’s revenge”.
The people who made the records
The first house records were made by Black Chicagoans working with drum machines and inexpensive synths. Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence wrote “On and On”, released in 1984 and frequently cited as the first house record on vinyl. Marshall Jefferson made “Move Your Body” (1986). Larry Heard, recording as Mr. Fingers, made “Can You Feel It” (1986) and worked with the singer Robert Owens. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb J, as Phuture, made “Acid Tracks” (1987). “Your Love”, by Jamie Principle and Frankie Knuckles, reached vinyl the same year.
Radio carried the sound across the city. From 1981 the Hot Mix 5 (Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Mickey “Mixin” Oliver, Ralphi Rosario, Kenny “Jammin” Jason and Scott “Smokin” Silz) were the mix-show DJs on WBMX. By the mid-1980s Chicago’s house clubs were drawing Black, Mexican American and gay crowds. In New York, Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez began working together as Masters at Work in 1990. Their Nuyorican Soul project takes its name from their city and their Puerto Rican heritage, and their 1991 track “The Ha Dance” became a fixture of the ballroom scene.
How the credit got lost
House reached the UK charts in 1986, and as it spread, the people selling it changed. In 1989 the Italian group Black Box had Britain’s best-selling single of the year with “Ride on Time”. Its vocal was sampled, without a license, from Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 record “Love Sensation”, and a model mimed it on television. Martha Wash sang on other Black Box tracks, and on C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” (1990), without credit while models appeared in the videos. She sued, both cases were settled, and her name went on the records.
Money is the other half of it. Trax Records pressed many of the Chicago classics, and artists including DJ Pierre have said the label never paid them royalties. Larry Heard and Robert Owens sued Trax in 2020, and in 2022 they regained ownership of their early recordings, though without damages.
Then came the American festival boom of the 2010s, sold under the name EDM. I think it’s fair to say that many people who found dance music in those years, through main stages and pop radio, were never told where it came from. The four producers I name as my own influences, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Calvin Harris and David Guetta, are Dutch, Dutch, Scottish and French. All of them work in a form that started in those Chicago and New York rooms. So do I.
The credit being put back
Some of it has been restored. In 2004 Chicago named a stretch of Jefferson Street Frankie Knuckles Way, with help from a state senator named Barack Obama, and declared August 25 Frankie Knuckles Day. Knuckles died on March 31, 2014. In June 2023 the Warehouse building was designated a Chicago landmark.
Pop has started saying it out loud as well. Beyoncé’s album “Renaissance” (2022) was made as a tribute to Black and queer dance music, with Honey Dijon among its producers and Larry Heard’s “Mystery of Love” among its sources, and it won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album. The year before, the South African house producer Black Coffee had won the same award for “Subconsciously”.
What crediting it looks like
I don’t think anyone owns a genre. Crediting one properly is a smaller thing: knowing the names and saying them. If you make or love this music, the records above are the place to start. I’ve written about how I came to electronic music myself, and about the artists who took dance music from raves to radio. Both of those stories begin later than this one, and neither would exist without it.