Frankie Knuckles, the Chicago house legend, has died aged 59.



Knuckles died on Monday, revealed his longtime business partner, Frederick Dunson. According to the Chicago Tribune, more details would be confirmed today, with Dunson writing in an email that Knuckles “died unexpectedly this afternoon at home”.

Most famous for tracks such as 1987's Your Love and 1991's The Whistle Song, he was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame in 2005. In 2004, 25 August was declared Frankie Knuckles Day in Chicago with help from then-senator Barack Obama.

Born in the Bronx in 1955, he became a DJ in the early 1970s with his friend Larry Levan. An integral artist in the development of house music, Knuckles went onto not only pioneer the genre, but mix records by artists such as Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode.



Only last weekend, on 29 March, the DJ played at London's Ministry of Sound, two days before his death in Chicago.



Tributes have been pouring in for the producer on social media this morning.



Knuckles, who is credited to have invented the house genre, begun his residency at the westside club in 1977 at the height of disco fever, but by 1980 a backlash had swept the craze away. He began playing obscure imports and re-editing oddball disco records for maximum dancefloor impact. The crowd, overwhelmingly black and gay, went nuts for the style which became known as "house" as the new underground style spread to clubs across the city. "As disco died, we started to play around with drum machines and re-edit old songs, to keep the crowd engaged, to make them hear classics in a different way," Knuckles wrote for the Observer in 2007. "Other people who were perhaps more musically inclined than me, often because they were musicians in church bands, saw this as a new way of doing things and picked the ball up and ran with it."

Knuckles's and fellow pioneer Ron Hardy's merging of Salsoul classics with mutant disco, electro and European synth-pop paved the way for the first tailor-made house tracks in 1984. Six years later, Knuckles proudly described his creation as "disco's revenge".