For decades, house music fans heard a thundering voice break through the dance beats to sermonize “In the beginning, there was Jack!”
For the uninitiated, jack is a reference to “jacking” — a style of dance associated with house music.
The sermon, just under two minutes, was sampled by DJs around the world and became a credo of sorts for the underground dance genre.
But people didn’t know whose voice it was. And the man behind the voice became a mythical character in house music.
That is, until Chuck “The Voice” Roberts took the stage at the Chosen Few DJ festival in Jackson Park in 2017 and boomed the words live for the first time in 27 years.
Thousands of stunned house fans did a double take after realizing the voice they’d heard countless times wasn’t being sampled, but performed live.
Famed Chicago house deejay Terry Hunter was there. His jaw hit the floor, too.
Video of the performance went viral.
And soon Mr. Roberts landed a record deal and rerecorded his “sermon” with Hunter mixing in beats. He was tapped by organizers of the Amsterdam Dance Event, a major European electronic dance festival, to kick off the event.
Beyoncé's management team reached out last year to ask permission to sample the track during live performances on her Renaissance tour.
He performed during halftime at a Bulls game in January.
And the tale of Mr. Roberts, a Chicago musician who grew up on the West Side, became known.
“It was just this crazy thing, because he was kind of undercover for 30 years, living his life in Chicago, before anyone really knew who he was and began to finally associate his face and name with the voice,” said his manager Aaron Burks.
“That’s why for the longest time his nickname was ‘The Voice,’ ” Burks said.
Mr. Roberts died June 6 from cancer. He was 66.
He originally recorded the sermon, titled “My House,” at a West Side studio in 1986 as part of Rhythm Controll, a short-lived group that released only one record.
It offered up two tracks — a short version and a long version of “My House” with dance beats mixed in.
The group members — Billy Sims, Quick Mix Claude, T. Lewis, C. Parker and Darrell Bruce Abbott — knew they wanted the record to reflect the almost spiritual experience of house. They tapped Mr. Roberts, who grew up singing in choir and later became a minister, to put the music genre into words.
He spoke the words before he wrote them down, and he recorded the track in just five takes.
The words capture the message of inclusion and equality that’s baked into house music. Its last line is: “You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or gentile. It don’t make a difference in our house. And this is fresh!”
Outside of a small group of Chicagoans, hardly anyone knew who Mr. Roberts was or his role in the song as it became an underground hit.
There was not much acclaim or financial reward for house music artists at the time.
“The genre is really, in the last couple years, just getting the recognition that it deserves for helping to lay the foundation of what electronic dance music would become,” Burks said. “For a long time it was the stepchild of the industry, an underground subgenre.”
Mr. Roberts, who sang in funk and R&B bands before getting into house music, contributed to a few more house records and worked as a producer. None of that work came close to reaching the sort of massive audience that “My House” — which is also known as “In the Beginning” — reached.
Making it as a musician was tough, and for years Mr. Roberts, who lived in the western suburbs, had a number of jobs outside of music, including a longtime position as a baker at several Chicago-area Panera eateries.
“For years he really didn’t know the magnitude of how big that song got until he heard his voice in the background of a video game his son was playing,” said Burks, who became Mr. Roberts’ manager in 2017 as Mr. Roberts pondered a way to get back into music.
A subsequent lawsuit was settled by the video game maker.
Mr. Roberts didn’t get paid for all the bootleg sampling that deejays did over the years, but he realized, and was humbled by the fact, that they built momentum and created the environment that allowed him to step into the spotlight late in life, Burks said.
“I can’t find the words to express how happy and excited he was with how his career was taking off,” said his wife, Shirley Roberts.
Mr. Roberts first heard house music at The Factory, a now-closed club on the West Side that became known as a hub for house in the 1980s. He was immediately captured by the sound and the effect it had on club-goers of all stripes.
As a guest last year on the “Everything House Music and More” podcast with Grammy-winning host Maurice Joshua, Mr. Roberts was asked about what his future held.
“I want to keep on spreading love through music and bringing people together. ... Especially in the times we are in now, we need positive stuff,” he said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Roberts is survived by eight children, 17 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
