In the beginning, there was jack. From jack, house was born and from house came some nasty, raw music that rattled the Low End streets of Chicago's South Side. DJ Deeon was the architect of this style, dubbed ghetto house, due to its origins in the housing projects—where small, sweaty apartments would pack massive sound systems and hundreds of eager dancers. Hailing from the Wentworth Gardens estate, and later moving to Stateway Gardens, Deeon Boyd was part of the generation who saw the birth of house and hip-hop. His beats were indisputably house, but harder than his predecessors (the likes of Marshall Jefferson, Lil' Louis, Larry Heard) who, by then, were touring the other side of the Atlantic to meet a growing demand for house music. Boyd borrowed rap's rhythmic lyricism on his catchy anthems, always driven by his distinctive voice, deep and swaddled in a Great Lakes drawl.

The last two decades of Boyd's life were addled by chronic health issues. In 2002, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a cancer that impacts the lymphatic system. After a year of chemotherapy, the cancer disappeared, only to return a decade later after Boyd underwent quadruple bypass surgery. His lower leg was amputated in that same year. In 2020, he launched a GoFundMe page that revealed the true extent of his health problems, including that he had endured several mini strokes between 2018 and 2019. His musical output during these years remained consistent, but the productivity in his later years was likely out of financial necessity. Boyd faced the fate of many Black pioneers revered for their contributions, but still forced to face the harsh realities of a world, and medical industry, unforgiving to Black people.

"I'm not a money for nothing guy," he wrote in the crowdfunder description. "So in return, I'm offering up a series of unreleased edits and remixes, exclusive T-shirts and caps, even the chance for me to remix you." This year, he released 10 records on Bandcamp between February and May—eight of those releases came out in May. After he died last week, his close friends from Chicago and beyond spoke of a man that was tenacious and affable, carrying a permanent, infectious laugh despite his illnesses.

Boyd wasn't only the godfather of ghetto house—he was a peacemaker within it. He acted as a bridge between different friend groups throughout Chicago. His presence demanded respect, and respect was something he returned generously. His endless creativity fueled his prolific output, which came in the form of countless cassettes, demos and EPs spread out across four decades. He may have outproduced many of his peers, but in Chicago's competitive scene he still managed to be a supportive figure, lending tips and guidance where he could. When a fresh wave of disciples came along with a new branch of the genre called footwork, he embraced them with open arms.

His music was minimalist, gritty and unpolished, pulled directly from a 606, 808 and a sampler in a modest home studio. His sound resonated with his neighbourhood because it spoke to their lived experiences. As someone who was integrated into all parts of the Chicago scene and had friends around the city, Boyd's music was a direct reflection of the scene around him. In 1994, his Funk City EP included "Da Bomb," a response to rumours circulating that his friend and collaborator, DJ Milton, had died. The song is famed for its hilarious and ever-catchy lyrics: "Milton ain't dead / Get that thought out yo head / There's no need for alarm / Cus Deeon dropped the bomb."

When his work began to spread across Chicago, and then overseas, what made it appeal to those outside of the Low End was its inimitable funk. Throughout his career, even as he developed more access to advanced equipment, Boyd never lost sight of this sacred groove. On the phone, his right-hand man, DJ Slugo, relayed a recent conversation he had with a man from Belgium about Slugo's upcoming record. "I told him I was waiting on an engineer to mix and master my album and he was like, 'Hell no. Do what y'all been doing like straight out of the drum machine onto the record,'" he said."'That's what we love—that gritty, nasty-ass sound with them fucked up chants that sound like you're mumbling through a fucked up microphone.'"

Pictured from left to right: DJ Milton, DJ Deeon, DJ Slugo and J.R. Deonte.

Boyd's roughshod music came to represent a wider ethos beyond his hometown. Most famously, it spread to Paris in 1997, when Daft Punk called him one of their "Teachers" on their debut album, Homework. Boyd encouraged an entire generation of house artists to make music that was not only authentic and rowdy, but also a little explicit. On 1996's "Freak Like Me," a grunting bassline and isolated claps percolate over Tish Bailey's sugary vocals: "You need a freak like me / To make love to your bah-day." The 2006 track "Dick-n-Ballz" was by far his dirtiest, instructing hoes from the North, South, West and East side of Chicago to engage with his nether regions.

Boyd got his start in music in the early '80s, after his friend received a set of turntables as a Christmas gift. His curiosity led him to make his own productions from rudimentary loops and sampled acapellas. These tracks would make their way into mixtapes that Deeon sold to Chinese-owned clothing stores and drug dealers who sold weed in his building. In later years, Dance Mania founder Ray Barney would distribute the mixtapes, shipping the Low End sound overseas.

A Playground Productions cassette by DJ Milton, DJ Slugo and DJ Deeon released on Dance Mania records in 1995.

Deeon assembled a crew in the '90s, but it wasn't without some hiccups due to hostilities within his neighbourhood. While DJ Slugo was in jail, two DJ crews from the projects—Boyd, DJ Carlos and DJ Milton, representing the Stateway Gardens, and DJ Monty, Mikey Mike and PJ, who claimed Harold Ickes Homes—were involved in a furious (but strictly musical) battle. For several years, the two teams circulated mixtapes of diss tracks against the opposing crew while the neighborhood followed excitedly. Unbeknownst to Slugo, when he returned to Robert Taylor Homes, his friends in Harold Ickes had released a mixtape that placed him in the middle of the battle: "Our boy Slugo home. And it's gonna go down." To which, in a subsequent mixtape, Deeon and Milton responded to the effect of, "Who the fuck is Slugo? He could get it too."

"And then some genius decided to book us all together at a party," DJ Slugo told me. "Of course, they were paying us, so we agreed to do the party." Several DJs from each team played a venue within a shopping mall on 39th street. The event spurred instant chaos. Cars were double-parked outside the venue as the attendees, each rooting for one side, flooded the space.

The night was also incredibly profitable. Once the promoter collected the money from the door, he told the DJs they could pocket the remainder. He just wanted to prove that the Low End DJs work better together than they do apart. When the crews realised how much money they could make together, the battle ended that night. Boyd's new DJ crew and label, Playground Productions—which included DJ Slugo and DJ Milton—was born shortly after, and became known for throwing get-downs that were so raucous the police knew better than to stop them.

"They came out with their [own] type of sound that was strictly for the hood," DJ Gant-Man said in the 2023 documentary, From Jack To Juke. "Most people from the hood couldn't afford to go to these [other] parties." The projects parties became so popular that they moved into rented banquet halls, shopping malls and even, for a period, a mosque. As the hype grew, so did the crowd. No longer were the dancers limited to the Low End. Ghetto house fans from the entire South Side and West Side filled the venues to the brim, bending the floorboards and making the walls sweat.

House producer Victor "Parris" Mitchell pictured (left) with Ray Barney (right), founder of Dance Mania Records, the Chicago label that was "ghetto house's Motown."

There was a constant deluge of new DJ Deeon cuts around this time. "He was always debuting new tracks," footwork pioneer RP Boo, a mentee of Boyd, told me over the phone. "We could be out on the streets and say 'Hey, whose tape is that?' and find out he dropped another one." Competition was an important part of the rush of tracks from Boyd and his peers in that golden era of ghetto house, which lasted from the early '90s to early '00s. In an interview with Construct, Boyd explained how the cutthroat nature of the scene inspired a constant proliferation of new music. "It was more competitive like, 'I like that track. I could do something like that or I could do better.' We inspired each other to do more." He was producing so much material—at times, he would release up to five EPs at once—that his friends, DJ Slugo, DJ Milton, Jammin Gerald and DJ Funk, struggled to keep up.

The competitive environment of the early ghetto scene times even led to a few dirty tricks. Boyd might not have ended up on Chicago record label Dance Mania ("ghetto house's Motown") if several DJs across town hadn't ripped off his sound. Boyd would often tell the story of the time Armando Gallop sampled his "Yo Mouth" track off one of his unlabeled mixtapes without permission in the early '90s. "I called Ray [Barney]. I said, 'this stuff you're putting out, it's really mine,'" Boyd told Construct. Barney responded diplomatically, suggesting that Boyd send some tracks over for the label to put out. When Boyd sent them over, Barney liked them—and the rest was history. Any tension between Gallop and Boyd also cooled over. Speaking to DJ Mag in 2022, he said, "I gotta give Armando credit. He apologised, and that's how I wound up on Dance Mania in the first place. From then on, Armando would stop by all the time with advice."

When Dance Mania eventually shuttered in 2000, its absence left room for something else to flourish. Just as Boyd had culled the best of house and hip-hop to propel ghetto house forward, a following generation of Chicago producers decided to speed up ghetto house to make juke, then speed juke up a smidge to land on the blazing, syncopated beats of footwork. If ghetto house had funk, footwork had soul. Footwork instrumentals mined from R&B and soul, and its lyrics focused on directing, or throwing off, dancers shuffling, jerking and sliding to 160 BPM. Although the genre had been simmering since the '90s, it became established in Chicago at the turn of the millennium, emanating from the controlled fingers of pioneers RP Boo, DJ Clent and DJ Rashad. Boyd embraced this experimental iteration of ghetto house, developing and nurturing close relationships with the leaders of the footwork scene. In 2021, Deeon made his debut on the renowned footwork label Teklife (which Rashad cofounded with DJ Spinn), where he seemed to pay homage to the genre with four tracks that veered from dark-sided juke to modern footwork.

Boyd continued to support his local scene up until the very end. "Even with all of the health conditions he was dealing with, his spirit wasn't broken. He would come to a show and hear somebody play," footwork originator DJ Clent said. "What I picked up from him was [that] you keep fighting for it. And I'm never gonna give up."

DJ Deeon (to the far right) with the Teklife crew whose footwork sound he helped nurture.

Correction, July 25th: A previous version of this feature stated that DJ Monty, Mikey Mike and PJ were from the Robert Taylor Homes. They were from the Harold Ickes Homes.