Chip E. - It's House (Jack Trax, Gotta Dance Records,.

Chip E. - It`s House (Jack Trax, Gotta Dance Records, 1985)

In the early/mid eighties, Chip E. (Irwin Larry Eberhart II) studied marketing and music, worked at Importes Etc. record shop in Chicago, DJed at high school and basement parties, and started producing his own music. In an interview published on Gridface (2010), he talks around the inaugural track recorded for his debut EP, Jack Trax:

I know you`ve heard a lot of stories about where "house" comes from.

Actually what happened was, people would fall into Importes asking for some of the old disco music that Frankie [Knuckles] played. Now Frankie at The Warehouse never played house music, `cause house music didn`t live_ There was no such thing. But people would get into Importes Etc. and they would say, "Do you have any of that old music that Frankie played at The Warehouse?" Some people would simply start saying, "Do you make any of that old music Frankie played at the `family?" So we started putting up signs that would say, "As Heard at The Warehouse," or me being lazy, I`d just put up a signal that said, "As Heard at The House," and we`d find that anything that we put up that said "As Heard at The House," people would just blame it up without even listening to it. So I knew this term "house" was something that was passing to be marketable.

(credit: Gridface)

So the low book I recorded as division of my seven-track EP was a song called "It`s House," and the entireness of the lyrics are "It`s House." That`s it: "It`s house, it`s house, it`s house, it`s house," just in different pitches. I put together the right rhythms behind it and some nice bass note lines and melodies, but that was the low house record.

Now [Chicago-based DJ/producer] Jesse Saunders claims that he created the foremost house record. True, he created a book before me, but it was not a family record because house music did not exist, and his record, "On and On" was a re-make of a New York disco edit. You cannot do a new genre of medicine by re-making a disco edit. He just re-made a disco edit, period. It was not new music. "It`s House" was entirely new music. It created the genre of medicine we love as house, because it was minimalistic, it was tribal, it was driving, it was the quartet on the floor, and it was the sampling. It was based on the 808 and so later progressed into a 909 drum machine. That is the commencement of household music.

Read the ease of the question by Jacob Arnold on Gridface.