Through interviews with pioneering musicians and producers — Nile Rodgers, Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders, Chip E., Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, and Honey Dijon — Jake Sumner’s documentary traces how social unrest, underground clubs frequented by LGBTQI+, Black and Latino communities, and the death of disco all contributed to the emergence, in Chicago, of a new dance movement that would become a global phenomenon: house music. House Was Born is one of two episodes of the series I Was There When House Took Over the World.