Frankie Knuckles Claire Greenway/Getty Images
Let’s step back in time to the early ‘70s. We are at The Continental Baths, a prominent gay bathhouse in the basement of The Ansonia Hotel in New York City. In the Dj booth are two young Fashion Institute of Technology textile design students playing soul, disco, and R&B. Their names are Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles.
Sometime later Frankie would move to Chicago where his old friend, Robert Williams, was opening what became the nightclub called Warehouse. When the club opened in Chicago in 1977, he was invited to play on a regular basis, which enabled him to hone his skills and style. This style was a mixture of disco classics, unusual indie-label soul, the occasional rock track, European synth-disco, and all manner of rarities, which would all eventually codify as “House Music”.
This eclectic mix of a wide variety of sources upon one dancy backbone became the soul of his style. Being cited as one of the major influences of many DJs later and the Godfather of House, Frankie’s Legacy is firmly cemented in history. In 1999 he was even named 23rd on Dj Mags Top 100 DJs.
In the mid-2000s, Knuckles developed Type II diabetes. He later developed osteomyelitis after breaking his foot snowboarding, and had it amputated after declining to take time off for treatment. On March 31, 2014, he died in Chicago at the age of 59 due to complications from his diabetes.
Let us remember his legacy and all he influenced with his last released mix on BBC1.
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