How Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ harnessed the unifying power of music on the dancefloor (DJ Mag)

It’s little wonder that ‘Promised Land’, the evergreen dance cut from the late 1980s, has endured for so many years. It hit at exactly the time that house music was taking off internationally, and its heartfelt words of hope and peace have resonated with dancers and music fans everywhere ever since.

Almost a gospel sermon, the words and music were written by Joe Smooth, a DJ in Chicago who grew up on the south-east side of the Windy City. “It was a middle- class area,” says Joe. “The block I lived on had a famous poet, a theatre production company, some pilots. My next-door neighbour was a professor at the university of Chicago — it was a very mixed community. It was a predominantly Black community where you knew your neighbours — everybody in the area was kinda like family.”

As a kid, Joe used to lap up musicals on TV starring Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and when his mother bought a piano for his sister, he started messing around on it aged about 12, trying to create sounds like he’d hear in these musicals. “I would be in the house for eight or nine hours a day after school, playing around on the piano, trying to figure out how to play songs, while all my friends were out in the park playing,” Joe recalls. He got into DJing at high school, doing high school parties and neighbourhood events, “where we’d close off a block and bring equipment outside and throw parties in the street”

Joe then moved away to college to study engineering but, having found it boring, he headed back to Chicago to enrol at the Art Institute to study graphic design. “While I was there this whole DJ thing was continuously going on,” he says. “On the South Side of Chicago you had your DJs Farley [Jackmaster Funk], Steve Hurley, Lil Louis and those guys playing. For me, I felt ‘This is really crowded over here, let’s go and explore the North Side of Chicago’, so I ended up going to a club called Smartbar, which opened in 1982.”

Joe would hang out at Smartbar and talk to the owner about the fact that he DJ’d, with a view to possibly obtaining a slot there. Smartbar at the time was primarily an alternative rock club playing music by acts like Public Image Ltd and New Order, but owner Joe Shanahan had a big interest in underground dance music. Joe knew Shanahan from the Warehouse, the fabled club where Frankie Knuckles ruled the roost, and the Smartbar owner offered Joe a night after one of his regulars moved to New York.

“The DJs on the North Side didn’t mix in the same way as we mixed on the South Side,” says Joe. “On the North Side, they would segue from one record to the next record. I was pretty much the only DJ on the North Side who actually knew how to mix records together, which is why at some point the bartenders said ‘Joe mixes so smoothly…’.”

Joe’s new DJ name stuck. He’d play all sorts of music in his sets at Smartbar originally — “It being such an eclectic place, I would play your Philly sound, Euro dance music, and mix them together with your Tears For Fears and Blancmange and sounds like that,” he says — until house music started to come into play. “Back when it first started, Chicago DJs had a competitive edge — everybody wanted to be able to play something different that other people didn’t have,” Joe says. One night a guy who called himself Chip-E came into Smartbar.

“I had one of the first Mirage Ensoniq keyboards, it was something like No.40 handmade off the line, and I had that in the DJ booth along with an 808 drum machine,” Joe remembers. “I would create beats and stuff to blend into the songs that I was mixing at Smartbar. Chip came in and asked if I could come and play keyboards — I was one of the only DJs who could actually play keyboards back at that time.”

The first project Joe worked on with Chip-E was the ‘Jack Trax’ EP, which just so happened to be a pioneering record in the evolution of house music. Chip-E worked in the Importes, Etc record shop in Chicago, where he’d find that if they’d label a disco track ‘house’ — short for ‘as played at the Warehouse’ — then they’d sell a tonne of copies of them. The emerging house sound was on a continuum from disco, born on dancefloors predominantly filled with people from the area’s Black, LGBTQ+ and Latino communities.

For a short while ‘jacking’ referred to a jerky way of dancing in various Chicago clubs. Fabled early house producers such as Steve Hurley, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Jesse Saunders and Chip reportedly didn’t go to the Warehouse, the predominantly Black gay club which closed in 1982, but hit upon the idea of making their own tracks and calling them ‘house’.

“This needs to be clear,” stresses Joe. “For Chicago to claim its proper spot as the place where house music was created, people need to clearly understand that the music that we were creating in the ’80s could never have been played at the Warehouse, because it closed in 1982. It was played when they opened up the Power House, Power Plant and the clubs after that timeline.”

Joe lent Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley his Ensoniq keyboard to make ‘Jack Your Body’, as fledgling producers began snapping up affordable pieces of analogue hardware equipment. “A lot of people got into buying equipment — in Chicago our main thing was always the dancefloor and the dancers,” says Joe. “What’s gonna appeal to your dancefloor? It wasn’t about the big melodies or the super song structure, it was really about what’s gonna put energy on a dancefloor. That’s why a lot of stuff was really raw, really drum-driven — drums, bassline, really catchy sample hooks. Taking out all the fluffy stuff that didn’t really need to be there, and get to the core of what’s gonna excite the dancefloor.”

Different religions and population movements throughout history have adopted the concept of an Exodus story, or ‘Promised Land’. Jewish, Palestinian, Christian, American colonialists, Mormons, Muslims and enslaved African people all looked towards a future utopia free from oppression at different times, while more recently Black civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King said in his celebrated — and final, before he was assassinated — speech, I’ve Been To The Mountaintop, in 1968: “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

For Joe, it was the universal power of music on a dancefloor that inspired him to create his timeless classic. Returning from a European tour, where dancefloors united despite not sharing the same native languages, he observed that the feeling behind the music was more important than the words. “Coming back off that tour, I was thinking that I wanted to create a song that spoke to music bringing everyone together,” Joe says. “When I got back to Chicago, I wanted to capture the idea of a classic record. And what was classic to me at that time was the whole Motown vibe. I would listen to a lot of these records and think, ‘What makes these records the way they are?’

“There was an inspired moment where the music came to me,” Joe continues. “When I hear something, I hear the whole thing in my head, and I was like, ‘OK, let’s put this down’. So I programmed the drums and put everything together that I was hearing.” He had a simple equipment setup at the time — a Roland 707 drum machine and its sister 727 model, his trusty Ensoniq Mirage, a Juno-106 synth, “and that’s pretty much it.” Once the basic music had been laid down, Joe felt that it needed some words to capture and encompass the feeling of the track. “What inspired the lyrics to ‘Promised Land’? What I saw globally. How music brought people together. Outside of all the crazy stuff — the wars, negativity that you experience in the world — music is a peace that connects everybody together. The love and appreciation I saw from how people appreciated the music is what inspired me to write the lyrics to ‘Promised Land’.”

There’s undoubtedly a spiritual utopian element behind ‘Promised Land’, Joe affirms. “Most of the stuff that I write has a spiritual thing leading the way,” he admits, suggesting he simply acts as a conduit. “‘Promised Land’ has always been a bigger record than me. It’s not really about me — it’s about a feeling in the people. When I wrote the lyrics, the idea just came into my mind about what I wanted to say. With a lot of stuff that I write, I don’t know if it’s God saying, ‘This is what you need to say’? But that’s how it typically happens. It was finding the right words to say, but as I was writing, the words were just coming to me — it was flowing.”

Chip-E signed ‘Jack Trax’, the EP he’d made with Joe’s help, to the fledgling DJ International imprint, after originally selling copies out of the back of Chip’s car. Through the label he met a singer named Anthony Thomas, who Joe got to do the vocals on his track ‘Goin’ Down’. Joe had initially vocalled ‘Promised Land’ himself, but then chose to draft in Anthony to sing it.“He had more like an Ohio Players / Trammps rough kinda voice, so he covered my vocal,” Joe says. Another singer, Don Connelly, does additional high-end falsetto vocals on the track too, although he isn’t credited. As soon as the track was finished, Joe thought it was a classic. “It just had such a flow to it, such a vibe to it,”he says. “I said, ‘I think we got it’.”

He put it out on DJ International, with promos immediately going to all the top DJs. “Everybody was vibing on the record — Farley, Steve Hurley, Frankie [Knuckles], Ron [Hardy], all the DJs pretty much supported the record when it first came out. There was a distributor, Benji Espinoza, who owned Quantum Distribution, who was a big supporter of the record, and he made sure that it got everywhere — New York, New Jersey, and globally to people like Pete Tong,” Joe continues, “so everyone was feeling it, there was a big strong vibe around the record. We were getting a lot of responses from the record to the point where… when ‘Promised Land’ was domestically released, it was received very well in the States. It had also been received well through Europe and the UK, which is how the Style Council got to hear the record.”

Paul Weller had risen to prominence in the UK music scene in the late ’70s punk era with his genuinely thrilling three-piece band The Jam. The self-styled Mods had hits like ‘Eton Rifles’, ‘Going Underground’ and ‘A Town Called Malice’, and spearheaded a whole youth movement, yet Weller disbanded The Jam at the height of their fame in 1982 and — like a true Mod — moved onto pastures new. He started the Style Council with keyboard player Mick Talbot to explore more soulful, jazzier styles, capturing the mid-’80s zeitgeist with singles such as ‘My Ever Changing Moods’ and ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’. The band recorded four albums and had considerable success, and by the late ’80s, Weller — an astute operator who generally had his ear to the ground — had got into the house music of Marshall Jefferson et al.

“I just thought it was a good song,” Weller told Fresh Air fanzine on why he covered ‘Promised Land’. “It always sounded like a gospel song to me, the chords and the way the voices were. We didn’t change it that much really, but we just made it more inspirational, more ‘up’.” The Style Council version reached No.27 in the UK charts in 1989, giving a new lease of life to Joe’s original, which then got to No.56 — its highest chart position — on re-release. Joe believes that because there were two versions out at the same time, it helped keep the original as more of an underground club record.

“The fact that the Style Council released their version did keep the original version a little more underground. But at the same time, it may have added to the longevity of the record itself, and the spaces it has travelled in from back then to now.” Joe has fond memories of playing ‘Promised Land’ at Smartbar, and later at the Limelight in Chicago, where he became head DJ. “One night I was doing a special event for Prince, one of his birthday parties,” he recalls, nonchalantly. “There was a lot of people hanging out — Andy Warhol came in, Basquiat was there. Basquiat gave me a painting, Andy Warhol gave me a watercolour painting of Basquiat when he was a teenager, it was a moment when you saw how much the artistic creative community appreciated the song.”

The beauty of ‘Promised Land’ is that it potentially soundtracked liberation struggles everywhere by virtue of its universality. It especially resonated in South Africa in the late ’80s, where the majority Black population were held back by the institutionally racist Apartheid system. This enforced segregation of ethnic groups, favouring whites, denied Black people the vote among other fundamental human rights.

Naturally there was resistance and opposition to this unjust state of affairs within South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC) and other liberation groupings. “‘Promised Land’ was big in South Africa to the point where, when [Nelson] Mandela was released from prison, Mandela’s people and the ANC contacted me about creating a song to play during his release from prison, which was the song I did ‘They Want To Be Free’,” says Joe. “It was greatly appreciated in South Africa, I think it touched a certain feeling for the people of Africa — the emotion behind it. People were being held down and oppressed, you had Apartheid going on at that time, and there was stuff going on that involved really unnecessary treatment of people,” he continues. “And I think ‘Promised Land’ is a song of hope. Hope, love, peace — and I think that resounded with the people of Africa.”

As well as continuing to inspire dancefloors, Joe has been told stories of how ‘Promised Land’ is frequently played at funerals, and recalls meeting prominent Scottish DJ, Michael Kilkie, when he was up in Scotland, who showed Joe how he had all the lyrics tattooed up his arm. He mentions being involved in the creation of a house music museum in Chicago, which feels well overdue, and how he never really tires of playing ‘Promised Land’ when he DJs out. “It’s a song that keeps changing with the times, but the spirit and the feeling is alway there,” he tells DJ Mag, citing the Solomun remix as the latest update to put a fresh spin on it.

He then tells the story of witnessing an 80-piece orchestra playing it at the Royal Albert Hall in London during a Haçienda Classical show, and the whole audience singing along. “When the song came on you had a great resounding cheer from the audience, and all of a sudden they started to join in and sing the song,” he recalls. “With the classical orchestra playing it, there was a lot of energy that you get from live music, and a lot of synergy that connects when you’ve got a room full of people embracing the same energy. It made me emotional. It was a very touching moment. A tear came from my eye,” he laughs.

As if further evidence were needed of its enduring appeal, at the ARC festival in Chicago in 2024, Carl Cox and Green Velvet closed their headline set on the main stage by dropping ‘Promised Land’. “It makes me proud that the song has stood the test of time, and that it’s found the place as a house anthem,” Joe says. “Like I said, for me, it’s a song of the people, and it’s great how it’s transitioned over all these years and still held its own, compared to the hundreds and thousands of records that are out today.”