Who actually invented house music?

No single person did, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a myth. House was born in Chicago in the early 1980s, made by a community of mostly Black and gay DJs and producers who turned disco's leftovers into something new. If you have to name one figure, it is Frankie Knuckles, the man history calls the Godfather of House. But the genre was a collective invention, equal parts club, drum machine and crowd.

How did Frankie Knuckles and the Warehouse give house its name?

Knuckles moved from New York to Chicago in 1977 to become the resident DJ at The Warehouse, a members club whose dancefloor was packed with Black and gay clubbers. When the disco records he loved ran too short for his crowd, he began splicing, re-editing and extending them, layering in a drum machine to keep the floor moving. Local record shops started labelling the kind of music he played 'house' music, as in, the sound from The Warehouse. The name stuck before the genre even fully existed.

Who made the first house records?

The DJs created the feeling; the producers learned to bottle it. Jesse Saunders, with Vince Lawrence, cut 'On and On' in 1984, widely credited as the first house track pressed to vinyl. Larry Heard, recording as Mr Fingers, brought real musicality and invented deep house with 'Can You Feel It' and 'Mystery of Love'. Marshall Jefferson wrote the piano-driven 'Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)' in 1986, and Phuture, featuring DJ Pierre, twisted a Roland TB-303 into 'Acid Tracks' (1987) and birthed acid house. Many of these records were broken first by Ron Hardy at the Music Box, whose rawer, harder style pushed the whole scene forward.

So did house come from Chicago or New York?

Both, in a way. House was born in Chicago, but its DNA is New York disco: the marathon, gospel-charged sets of Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage and David Mancuso's Loft parties, the church-of-the-dancefloor blueprint Knuckles carried with him to Chicago. It is no accident that the sound rose after Disco Demolition Night in 1979 tried to kill disco in public; house was the mutant child disco left behind, and it went on to conquer the world.