Rolling Stone magazine credits Frankie Knuckles as being one of the most important DJs of all time. Unfortunately the ‘Godfather of House Music’ as Frankie Knuckles was commonly known died of diabetes complications at the age of 59 in 2014.
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1955, Knuckles started his career as a DJ in the early 1970s. of the Eighties and Nineties’ He quickly became one of the most prolific house music producers and remixers in the 80’s and 90’s.
At his Chicago clubs the Warehouse (1977-82) and Power Plant (1983-85), Knuckles’ marathon sets, typically featuring his own extended edits of a wide selection of tracks from disco to post-punk, R&B to synth-heavy Eurodisco, laid the groundwork for electronic dance music culture— are widely attributed to the birth of the term “house” music (an abbreviation of ‘Warehouse’).
Frankie Knuckles created numerous dance classics, including early Jamie Principle collaborations “Your Love”(1986) and “Baby Wants to Ride”(1987); “Tears”(1989), with Satoshi Tomiiee and Robert Owens; “The Whistle Song”(1991); and his remixes of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody”(1989), Sounds of Blackness’s “The Pressure” (1992), and Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind” (2008). As his star rose so did the status of his collaborators which included Luther Vandross, Diana Ross, Madonna, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson.
“[When] you’ve got someone as big as Luther Vandross and Michael Jackson sitting there saying, ‘Whatever you want, however you want it, I’ll stay here as long as you need me,’ that’s the reward right there,” Frankie Knuckles said in 2011. He went on to win a Grammy Award for ‘Remixer of the Year, Non-Classical’ in 1997.
The award-winning DJ’s death was due to Frankie Knuckles began to develop diabetes health-related complications in the early-2000s reported the Chicago Tribute.
In July 2008 he had his right foot amputated: He’d broken it during a 2000 snowboarding accident in Switzerland, leading to a bone disease exacerbated by late-breaking diabetes.
“When I saw it was gone I had a good cry, but when I woke up the next morning I felt 1,000% better,” Frankie Knuckles told the Guardian in 2011. “I didn’t realize how much pain I’d been in until it was gone. It was like all of a sudden the sun came out.”
Diabetes health-related complications can include nerve damage and poor blood circulation. These problems make the feet vulnerable to skin sores (ulcers) that can worsen quickly.
More than 80 percent of amputations begin with foot ulcers. A non-healing ulcer that causes severe damage to tissues and bone may require surgical removal (amputation) of a toe, foot or part of a leg.
The good news is that proper diabetes management and careful foot care can help prevent foot ulcers. In fact, better diabetes care is probably why the rates of lower limb amputations have gone down by more than 50 percent in the past 20 years.
“We lost Frankie way too soon,” said Frankie Knuckles Foundation (FKF) committee member Robin Robinson. “He was always ahead of his time. He recognized the power to unite people who had never partied together before. Gay and straight, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, they all came together to crush the traditional social divisions in their mutual love of his DJ-created music that was made for dancing together.”
The Frankie Knuckles Foundation (FKF) is a not for profit educational, and cultural organization dedicated to the advancement of Frankie Knuckles’ mission as the global ambassador of house music through media, conservation and public events continuing and supporting the causes he advocated.
The FKF is a recognized 501c3 and focused on these initiatives: music in schools, LGBTQ youth homelessness, AIDS research / prevention & diabetes research / education.