Despite the summer heat, tens of thousands of people packed into Jackson Park Saturday afternoon, dancing and barbecuing under the cover of hundreds of colorful pop-up tents. The smell of grilled meats wafted through the air as Chicago’s own house music thumped through speakers and boomed from the central festival stage.
Calling themselves “House Heads,” attendees gathered on the South Side for the 36th annual Chosen Few DJs Picnic and Music Festival. Organizers expected around 45,000 people to attend Chosen Few, which is widely considered one of the largest house music festivals in the world.
Though the size and logistics of the festival have changed over its three-and-a-half decades, Chosen Few’s roots remain unshaken. At its inception, Chosen Few began as a small family reunion, and, for many attendees, it still feels that way today.
Keesha Lee and Miriam Smith have attended Chosen Few together for more than 15 years. The sisters-in-law come back every year for the music, the people and the fellowship. Lee called it a “big reunion.’
“People I went to high school with, people I went to college with and have never seen again, but they always come here,” Smith said.
Ramona Thomas and William Cook have been friends since they attended fifth grade together at Emerson Elementary School in south suburban Harvey. The music festival has bonded their friendship over the years, as Thomas has attended all 36 festivals and Cook has missed only one.
“We’re House Heads,” Thomas said. “We love house music, so it doesn’t even matter what the price is, it doesn’t matter the setup. We’re gonna have the same DJs that we like and we’re gonna have the same music. It’s nostalgic. It just doesn’t change.
The pair has seen the festival evolve from a small, free event hosted behind the Museum of Science and Industry into a full-out festival. Cook, a life-long South Side resident, recalled when Chosen Few had no vendors, no sponsors and no admission fees.
“The way we used to get money for the permit was we passed a bucket around,” Cook said. “There would be some buckets on stage and you would just pass it around; people would throw in whatever they had in their pockets. Quarters, dimes, dollars – whatever you gave went toward the next year’s permit.”
This year, the festival shares its Jackson Park location with the newly opened Obama Presidential Center. The top of the concrete museum building peeked out from behind the main DJ stage. For Cook, it’s a full-circle moment, as he remembered years ago, in 2015, when Former President Obama sent in a video message that played above the festival’s stage.
“It was a cheer that you could imagine,” Cook remembered. “Having the building there is reminiscent of him looking over us and reminding us that, hey, we’re not too far from greatness right there.”
The Obama Presidential Center has not changed the dynamic of the festival otherwise, attendees agreed. If anything, a few more passersby get to hear the Chicago-grown music genre,
“It hasn’t changed the party and the picnic because for 36 years, it’s the same people that have been coming. So they would have come anyway,” Thomas said. “But what it has done is, people who want to come visit Chicago, you find a festival, a picnic and the Obama Center, so you probably gain more people because of that.”
At the end of the day, it’s not the festival itself that keeps long-timers returning to Jackson Park year over year, or what draws in newcomers. It’s the music.
“It connects us back to our roots,” said Lewis Patterson, a Bronzeville native. “I grew up on it and it’s a spiritual connection back to the roots. We grew up listening to this music. No matter what we were going through in our lives and escaping our problems.”
