Lil Louis
Lil Louis

Pioneer, Icon, Mogul, and Renaissance man are all words that describe Louis Burns aka Lil Louis. An international Artist, Producer, Songwriter, DJ, Author and Director, Lil Louis is credited as being the Founding Father of House Music.
As the son of the late great Blues artist Bobby Sims, music became essential in Louis's adolescent life when at age 8 he begin to play the drums and bass. In 1974, while working at a party organized by his mother Mary to unite Chicago gangs, Louis was asked to play after the DJ fell ill. The acclaim from the crowd birthed the 12-year-old's career as a DJ, and by many accounts, the birth of House music.
Louis was the first in Chicago to regularly play Disco. A feat that earned him awe and ire. Subsequently, he was fired from every club he worked at during the first years of his career. At 16, Louis decided to venture into entrepreneurship and opened the first of many of his successful Chicago nightclubs. In the mid 70s, he took mixing another step, by pioneering "Edits", a tool that planted the seed of House Music. Taking his gift for mixing into the studio, Louis began to make his own recordings in 1980. Initially, Louis deemed his tracks merely a marketing tool, reserved strictly for his club goers. His first official release was How I Feel b/w Frequency, on Dance Mania, followed by several others. In 1987, he released one of the most important House records of all time, French Kiss which topped charts around the world selling 6 million copies and making Louis the Top Selling Dance Artist in history.