from “le détroit” · the strait
Detroit DJ Stacey Hale, known across the city as the Godmother of House, played the Movement Stage at this year's festival and keeps teaching the next wave of women behind the decks.
Stacey "Hotwaxx" Hale has been a fixture of Detroit dance music for decades, and the title that follows her around the city is the one she has earned: the Godmother of House. Her own bio puts the origin of that name in the late 1980s, when she became the first woman to play house music on Detroit radio.
Hale built her reputation on the air and on the floor. Her Resident Advisor profile traces her radio run across Detroit stations including WJLB, WHYT, WDRQ and WLBS, and her work in city rooms such as Cheeks, Heaven, Populux, Menjo's and the Warehouse. The same profile lists festival appearances at Detroit's Electronic Music Festival, Movement, Motor City Pride and Dally in the Alley. The throughline is consistency. She has kept working through eras that came and went around her.
The bookings stretch well past Detroit. Hale's official biography lists sets at the Apollo in New York and the Fox in Detroit, and international dates in London, Ibiza, Berlin, Amsterdam, Toronto and beyond. Her production credits, per her own site, include collaborations with Detroit names like Eddie Fowlkes, Alton Miller, Kevin Saunderson, Norma Jean Bell, K-Hand and Jeff Mills.
The part of the resume she talks about most is the teaching. Hale has served as a DJ instructor with Girls Rock Detroit since its early days, and she teaches DJ and production classes through programs tied to the Detroit Institute of Music Education and other youth arts groups, according to her biography. The stated mission is to move more women and non-binary artists into a scene that did not always make room for them. She also created Detroit's Sheometry Arts and Music Festival, which launched in 2019, and that same year she was inducted into the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville.
This year's Movement put her back on the city's biggest dance stage. Hale was on the 2024 lineup and played the Movement Stage on Saturday, May 25, the opening day of the Hart Plaza festival, which ran through Memorial Day, per CBS Detroit's lineup coverage.
She sums up the long run plainly in her own line, quoted on her Resident Advisor page: "For as long as there is music and those who faithfully dance, there will always be a need for the Godmother of House Music."
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