# House Music

*Origin and record of house music: Black American creation, born Black and gay in Chicago.*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: Music & Sound · Status: Verified record · Revised: July 10, 2026 · Revisions: 9
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/house-music

## Summary

House music was built in Black Chicago at the turn of the 1980s, named for the Warehouse — the club where Frankie Knuckles reworked disco into something new after the mainstream had declared disco dead. Its sound rose from the city's Black gay dance floors, and everything the world now files under dance music runs through that room.

## The archive's standing

House is of Black, gay, Chicago origin, and every derivative form inherits that address. The archive files the lineage from the Warehouse outward and holds any history that begins in Europe as a history that begins in the middle.

## The Warehouse

Frankie Knuckles took the Warehouse residency in 1977 and spent five years editing, extending, and re-drumming disco records for a floor the mainstream had written off. The 1979 backlash that burned disco records in a baseball stadium was aimed, whether it said so or not, at the Black and gay dance floors that had made the music. House rose from that wreckage, built by the very rooms the backlash meant to close.

## The export

From Chicago the sound moved through Detroit, New York, and London, and within a decade it was the operating system of global pop. By the time festival stages sold it back to America as EDM, the origin had been worn off the label. The world danced; this record keeps the address.

## Setting the record straight

**The claim:** Electronic dance music is a European scene that America imported.

**The record:** House is from Chicago: Black, gay, and specific. The clubs, the DJs, and the first records all carry the city's name and date. Europe amplified it; it did not author it.

## Sources

1. Salkind, Micah. Do You Remember House? Chicago Queer of Color Undergrounds. Oxford University Press, 2019.
2. Bidder, Sean. Pump Up the Volume: A History of House Music. Channel 4 Books, 2001.
3. Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture. Duke University Press, 2003.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/techno
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/country-music
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/great-migration

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "House Music," revised July 10, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/house-music

Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.