Stacey Hale has been DJing in Detroit since the 1970s. The "Godmother of House" framing is not a marketing line; it is what people in the city have called her for decades, and the DJ work has run continuously across five of them.
Hale grew up in Detroit and started DJing at private parties and small clubs in her teens. The early work pre-dates house music's recognized arrival in Detroit, and Hale has been on record about playing soul, funk, and disco selections in the late 1970s, then moving into the proto-house sound as the records started coming out of Chicago and New York. She was on the scene before the genre had a name.
The DJ history runs across Detroit's main rooms over decades. She played the Music Institute, the late-1980s Detroit techno club Chez Damier and Alton Miller ran on Broadway. She worked the city's Black-owned clubs through the 1990s. She has been a consistent fixture at Movement, at the Charivari Detroit festival, and at the city's afterparty rooms in the Paxahau era. She has been involved in mentorship and Detroit dance-music history work for decades.
The mentor work is part of the public record. Hale has trained, advised, and platformed multiple Detroit DJs across generations, including DJ Minx and several producers in the Women on Wax orbit. She has been outspoken about the gender gaps in Detroit dance lineups and about the gatekeeping that kept women out of the city's first-wave techno-and-house bookings. The argument is that she had to clear ground for herself and has spent the years since clearing it for others.
The Movement weekend that just closed had Hale on multiple stages and at the Submerge-adjacent showcases. She played a deep-house set at the festival and a longer one at one of the afterparty rooms. The bookings have run almost annually since the festival's revival.
The catalog is the DJ work, not the studio work. Hale has released a small number of records under her own name and has been a featured DJ on Detroit-focused compilations, but the public-facing catalog is the live history. She has been documented in interviews, in long-running radio shows, and in Movement programming notes since at least the late 1990s.
She has stayed in Detroit. The bookings are mostly local. She treats Detroit dance music as the inheritance she helped build, and the schedule keeps her on it.
The 24th edition of Movement closed on Memorial Day. Hale is on the Detroit summer festival circuit through the rest of the season.
