Dr. Micah Salkind is the Special Projects Manager for The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. As part of his work, he collaborates with large non-profit cultural institutions as well as emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. He also serves on the boards of the Providence Public Library and Community MusicWorks and is an ongoing collaborator with dancers and scholars in Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance collective and Matthew Cumbie Projects’ “Growing Our Own Gardens” initiative.
A DJ, sound designer, and curator, he is the author of Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds for which these oral history interviews were collected. The work "historicizes house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago's queer, black, and Latino social dancers. Working from oral history interviews, archival research, and performance ethnography, it argues that the remediation and adaptation of house by multiple and overlapping crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that contemporary Chicago house music producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters re-remember and re-animate house as an archive indexing experiences of queer of colour congregation."
Currently, the audio files and biographical information are available; transcripts will be added when complete.
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Interview with Reggie 'DJ Purple' Davenport
Micah Salkind
Reggie Davenport came of age to the sound of hot mixing Chicago radio DJs during the 1980s. Shows on WKKC helped train him as a music lover at a young age, and he has kept his finger on the pulse of house music radio in the City ever since. He also cultivated his love of house music even when he left home to serve in the armed forces abroad, partying around England and the UK when he wasn’t on base. Today Davenport DJs online and around Chicago as DJ Purple.
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Interview with Reggie Stanton
Micah Salkind
Chicago music entrepreneur and videographer who came of age on the deep South Side during the days of roller discos and juice bars. Stanton’s father worked for Mayor Daly’s security detail and his mother was a butcher. He grew up around McCormack Place working for Andy Frank’s security business before his father retired from his work with Daly and took over the contract there. This work gave Stanton a front-row seat for some of the biggest house music promotions, both successes and failures, that took place at the venue.
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Interview with Reggio Mclaughlin
Micah Salkind
“Reggio got his start dancing in Chicago's streets and subways, where he brought smiles to commuters' faces while developing his unique style of footloose, fancy-free hoofing. Working with Urban Gateways, an educational institution for the performing arts, as a dancer and educator, Reggio combined art with learning to bring upbeat and informative presentations into schools, museums and libraries. As he delved deeper into tap's history, Reggio met and formed a dance partnership with fellow Chicagoan Ernest 'Brownie' Brown, the vaudeville and Cotton Club legend. Reggio's lively educational programs embody the tradition of tap with sparkling performances and rich stories about its roots. While he studies and performs nationally and internationally, Reggio is based in Chicago, where he works with the Old Town School of Folk Music, The Chicago Department on Aging and Global Roots Out-Reach - which serves children in low-income schools.
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Interview with Rita Bacon
Micah Salkind
Rita Bacon got her first taste of music promotion as a teenager growing up in Columbia, MO putting on rock shows at roller rinks. In 2001 she moved to Chicago with some friends and began working and partying around Wicker Park. Eventually she fell in with art school kids who were having shows and parties in Bridgeport loft spaces like Texas Ballroom before becoming a DJ with the Chances Dances collective. Bacon performed at Chances parties from their earliest incarnations in 2005 until the last days of the party in 2015.