Frankie Knuckles

Frankie Knuckles was born Francis Warren Nicholls Jr. in New York on 18 January 1955. He died in Chicago on 31 March 2014, aged 59. The obituaries called him the godfather of house. The phrase stuck because the work had already stuck. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was the resident DJ at the Warehouse, a club in Chicago whose name the music took. House was the shortened form of that room. He played disco when disco was being declared dead elsewhere, extended records, mixed them into a night, and helped invent the idea that a DJ could be the author of an evening. When the evening needed records that did not exist yet, he began making them.

Your Love is the record to carry. Jamie Principle wrote and sang it. Knuckles’s version, issued on Trax, is the one that became a foundation: a walking bassline, a drum machine keeping civil time, a vocal that sounds like a confession left on a machine. It has been covered and sampled often enough that people meet it without knowing the Trax 12-inch. The 12-inch is the document. Principle’s song, Knuckles’s production, a Chicago label that also put out the other early house singles the Warehouse crowd already understood. Jack Your Body, Hurley’s British number one in 1987, is downstream of this room. So is a great deal of what British dance still calls house without saying Chicago.

The date of his death is why this piece is called the thirty-first. A city named a music after a club, and the club’s DJ spent the rest of his life being introduced with a title he had earned before the title existed. Your Love is shorter than the legend and more useful. Put it on. The bass walks. The voice asks. The room it was made for is gone. The record is how you visit.

Sources

• Frankie Knuckles: born Francis Warren Nicholls Jr. in New York on 18 January 1955, died in Chicago on 31 March 2014, resident at the Warehouse.
• Your Love: Jamie Principle and Frankie Knuckles, the Trax recording.