Born on 18th January 1955, the late, great Frankie Knuckles’ influence on dance music culture cannot be understated. 11 years since his tragic passing, Bruce Tantum marks what would have been the Godfather of House music’s 70th birthday by selecting 20 tracks and mixes from across his long and storied career, mapping the legacy of a true pioneer, whose presence in the scene is eternal
No name is quite as synonymous with the birth of house music as that of the late, great Frankie Knuckles, who was born on 18th January 1955. Of course, the evolution of house from the DNA of disco — and, to lesser extents, electro, industrial, Italo and new wave music — was no solo endeavour: a family tree of progenitors from Chicago’s underground including Ron Hardy, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Jesse Saunders and Chip E all played key roles. But, as the story goes, it was the revered DJ and producer born Francis Warren Nicholls Jr’s sets at predominantly Black and gay clubs like The Warehouse that gave disco’s revenge its name. There is a reason why, to this day, he is known as The Godfather of House.
The schematics of Knuckles’ life and career are well known — or certainly should be — to pretty much every student of house music. Growing up in the Bronx, New York City, Frankie and his friend Larry Levan — himself a future pioneer in the art of DJing — started attending discos like The Loft and The Gallery as teenagers, soaking in the musical wisdom that the former’s David Mancuso and the latter’s Nicky Siano were providing. Before long, Knuckles was putting that knowledge to good use; he played his first DJ set at Tee Scott’s Better Days venue before taking on a years-long stint as DJ at the Continental Baths.
In 1977, Knuckles moved to Chicago and became resident DJ at The Warehouse, where he remained until its closure in 1982, after which he opened his own club, The Power Plant. In that time, he learned his way around the reel-to-reel and TR-909, which enabled him to re-edit and extend disco breaks and intros of records for his DJ sets. Full-scale music production came next, followed by a move back to New York in the late ’80s. With international DJ status and a stream of pioneering records to his name, his status as house music’s premiere ambassador was soon set — he even won the Grammy for Remixer of the Year in 1998, the category’s inaugural year.
But it’s more than the details of his bio, more even than his unassailable discography and DJ sets, that have made Knuckles such a beloved figure in the annals of house — it’s the man himself. Warm, generous, gracious and quick with a smile, he was gifted with a quiet charisma that was clear to anyone who met him, heard him play, or even breathed the same air he did. He helped spread the gospel of house through the sheer force of his personality. As Judy Russell, who as the head of the Def Mix DJ agency helped steer Knuckles’ career from the late ’80s onward, once said: “You just wish you could have bottled him up, he was so special.”
But, naturally, the music itself did help, and almost all of it seemed to beam straight from Knuckles’ heart. “He was one of the baddest motherfuckers — one of the baddest DJs, remixers, producers, artists — since the early ’80s, case closed,” his friend, collaborator and fellow Def Mix artist David Morales recalled in a recent piece in the Faith fanzine. “He was everything, at that time, that everybody wants to be today. He was so ahead of his fucking time.”
On 31st March 2014, Frankie Knuckles tragically died due to complications stemming from his Type 2 diabetes. He was 59. 11 years on, his legacy feels as strong as ever. As a quiet advocate of keeping it real — and meaningful, and beautiful — within the house realm, his impact remains as vital as it’s ever been, largely thanks to the music he left behind. To mark what would have been his 70th birthday, DJ Mag has compiled just some of his best productions, remixes and contributions, as well as a series of mixes from his days at the Warehouse to a joyous set in an intimate NYC industrial space recorded less than two years before he left us. Really, Knuckles has never disappeared — like disco’s revenge itself, the Godfather of House is eternal.
Dive in below.
He’d already been making tape edits to play in his sets years earlier, but by the mid-’80s Knuckles had finally begun to apply the knowledge gained through years of DJing to his own music. Even on his earliest releases, that experience — and his love for the music — shines bright. Essentially a raw drum-machine version of Teddy Pendergrass’s ‘You Can’t Hide From Yourself’, there’s a dreamy quality to this mix that lifts it miles above the average Chicago jack track.
One of the most beautiful house cuts ever committed to vinyl, ‘Your Love’ has a fairly convoluted backstory. In short, the song was initially written and released by Jamie Principle in 1986, before being re-recorded by Knuckles (with Principle’s vocals) and re-released the following year via Trax Records. Whatever its provenance, the tune’s heavenly synth arpeggio, indelible bass throb, and Principle’s aching vocals are pure ecstasy.
Another Principle track adapted by Knuckles and released as the B-side to ‘Your Love’, ‘Baby Wants to Ride’ comes across as that luscious track’s naughty doppelganger. With its extravagant mix of sex (“Ride me baby, ride, ride me long”), religion (“prepare for the Revelation 7, the final conflict”) and liberation (“South Africa, let my people go”), the feel is like that of a raw Prince track heard in the midst of an intoxicating dancefloor headrush.
This beloved tune isn’t truly a Knuckles production — a young Satoshi Tomiie, who had just joined the Def Mix camp, provided the music, while Knuckles supervised the Robert Owens vocal session and served as a sort of executive producer. (“He had a Quincy Jones type of role,” said Tomiie later). As one of the most moving tunes in all of dance music, it serves as an early example of Knuckles‘ “classic house” sound, even if he only deserves partial credit for its ultimate grandeur.
If there’s one word to describe this Knuckles rework of Rufus & Chaka Khan’s 1983 classic ‘Ain’t Nobody’, it’s dramatic. Taking the electro-funk scaffolding of the original into the dub ether, pushing the gorgeous piano chords and synth arpeggios to the fore, and patiently letting two-thirds of the song play out before dropping ghostly tendrils of Khan’s vocals, it’s a sign of Knuckles’ confidence as a master remixer.
A major hit, ‘The Whistle Song’ was Knuckles’ entry into the musical mainstream — yet, as with ‘Tears’, much of the credit has to go to his collaborators. Originally written and demoed by Knuckles’ frequent keyboardist Eric Kupper after hearing the DJ play at New York’s Red Zone, the track was later reshaped by the pair alongside engineer John Poppo and Paul Shapiro on flute. It’s not for everybody — one Discogs naysayer dismisses it as “bad ’90s kids’ TV show muzak”, for instance — but for the rest of us, hearing it is like a warm embrace from an old friend.
With lyrics like “For your deliverance, just bow your head and pray”, this is undoubtedly the most overtly religious entry on this list. That, however, did not prevent this rapturous mix from becoming a massive hit at decidedly secular spots like the Sound Factory in New York. This was in no small part thanks to the 40-strong Sounds of Blackness gospel choir, Ann Nesby’s soaring lead vocals and Knuckle’s immense repository of dancefloor knowledge.
1991 proved to be a watershed year for Knuckles. Besides ‘The Whistle Song’, ‘The Pressure Pt 1’ and a cornucopia of brilliant remixes — Lisa Stansfield’s ‘Change’, Sabrina Johnson’s ‘Friendship’, Adeva’s ‘It Should Have Been Me’ et.al. — there was this absolute stunner. With its rich arrangement, lush piano chords, serene pacing and Shelton Becton’s impossibly soul-stirring “brighter days are coming” vocals, ‘It’s Hard Sometime’ is perhaps the ne plus ultra of the Knuckles sound circa the early ’90s.
Nominally a cover version of Billy Paul’s 1977 ode to perseverance in the face of adversity, Knuckles makes the song utterly his own here, loading it up with a chugging rhythm, lavish piano (by this point a patented Knuckles staple) and amazing vocal work from Chicago house artist turned gospel mainstay Ricky Dillard. As with so much of the Knuckles discography, it’s the kind of tune that can still send shivers down to the dancefloor more than 30 years on.
Knuckles kept a small family of repeat collaborators (Morales and Kupper, among others), and throughout the ’90s, the gospel-trained vocalist Adeva was a core member of that crew. This tune, off Adeva’s Knuckles-produced LP ‘Welcome To The Real World’, was one of their biggest collaborations — with its earworm chord progression, buttery strings and Adeva’s kiss-off vocals, it’s also one of the best.
The lyrics of ‘Blind’ are about Hercules and Love Affair frontman Andy Butler’s difficulties growing up as a gay kid, with the marvellous Anohni stepping in on vocals. As a child of the Bronx, Knuckles could surely relate to the lyrics — as well as to the joy of escape, of overcoming, of achieving great things. For this mix, he transforms Butler’s melancholy original into something… not precisely happy, but into a song that allows you the possibility of hope.
Though there’s some debate as to whether this mix is actually from 1977 — some of its tracks, like Patti LaBelle’s ‘The Spirit’s in It’, weren’t yet released — this is still the earliest known Knuckles set to be found online. (If any recordings from his stint at the Continental Baths exist, someone is sitting on a treasure). Full of now-classic gems — and many of his own edits — like Teddy Pendergrass’ ‘The More I Get, the More I Want’ and Double Exposure’s ‘My Love Is Free’, Knuckles’ supremely silky selections and mixing acumen were already in full flower here. An essential artefact.
By 1982, Knuckles had relocated to the Power Plant club. It was there that he first began to incorporate a drum machine into his sets — and while there are no overt signs of its use in this set, there’s certainly something a bit more metronomic in its cadence. That’s not to say that it’s lacking in bliss — with songs like Double Exposure’s ‘My Love Is Free’ and Forrest’s much-overlooked ‘She’s So Divine’ in the mix, it’s pure pleasure.
It’s been said that Ron Hardy fully embraced the drum-machine sound of mid ’80s Chicago house records a bit more eagerly than Knuckles. That’s likely right, as this mix, resurfacing in 2022 after sitting in the Chicago DJ and producer Braxton Holmes’s archives for years, demonstrates. Brimming with disco-fuelled heat, starting with the Thelma Houston sample bonanza ‘I’m Here Again’ and finishing with Tulio De Piscopo’s subdued Balearic charmer ‘Stop Bajon’, this mix feels like ‘house’ through and through — a signpost on the path of what was to come.
Knuckles was never afraid to spin the big tunes — hell, his own discography is practically nothing but big tunes — but he certainly knew how to work a groove as well. And while this mix does have its share of hits — David Morales’ Def Club Mix of Mariah Carey’s ‘Dreamlover’ is still a mind-blower — it’s still pure groove, to say the least, with underground goodies like the Muchacho Dub of Lance Ellington’s ‘Lonely (Have We Lost Our Love)’ and Yellow & Black’s ‘Forever’ doing the heavy lifting.
This two-disc set is the only commercially released session on this list, and it’s here for a reason. With the power of the Ministry of Sound behind him, Knuckles was able to stack the mix with some of the best house music of the mid-’90s. François K’s ‘Hypnodelic’, Black Magic’s ‘Freedom (Make It Funky)’, Black Science Orchestra’s ‘Heavy Gospel Morning’ — pure clubland nirvana.
The first of four sets that Knuckles eventually dropped for BBC Radio 1’s long-running series, this might be the best — it’s hard-charging (by Knuckles standards, at least) and full of indelible tunes, the kind that surely got those hands waving in the air. It’s the kind of set that sounds like it was made by someone who truly loves the music he’s playing — which, as one of the people who basically invented house, Knuckles most definitely did.
The Saint at Large’s White Party has been carrying on the musical tradition of the iconic NYC gay club The Saint since it closed in the ’80s, and has been one of the biggest soirées on the circuit in the four decades since. Who better to play it than Knuckles? The mix pumps — the Saint crowd wouldn’t have it any other way — but it’s also a prime example of the Godfather in sentimental mode, with sweet cuts like Angie Stone’s ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’ and Knuckles’ own mix of Feela’s ‘Sweet Temptation’ wringing the emotion out of the dancefloor.
This wasn’t the last gig that Knuckles played — he was active right up until his untimely passing a year later — but for many in this crowd, it would prove to be the last time they’d get to experience their hometown hero in a live setting. In a raw party space, with seemingly half of the city’s clubbing community in attendance, the pioneer pushed through his health issues to deliver a smoothly euphoric set that was pure Knuckles. The love in the room was nearly overwhelming, just as it should be for the man who gave so much joy to the world.
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