Remembering Sam Chatman: Steppers danced all night at his Let’s Go to Work! Repast

Celeste Sutton Winfield first heard DJ Sam Chatman spin at a lounge called either “The Granville” or “Gravity” on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1970s. She was a teenager, she recalls, and wasn’t supposed to be out at no nightclub, whatever the name was. She had learned how to step from being the guinea pig for her older sister: “She would say, ‘Come here, Leslie, let me try these turns’ because my older sister was the bopper as it was turning into steppin’.” One day, after showing the guys she can split better than them, one of Winfield’s friends asked her to step in a contest with her. “I said, my momma not gonna let me go to no grown-people party. My curfew was 11:30 p.m,” she remembers. Her friend reassured her they’d be home by curfew, so she went out, dressed in farmer blue jeans with bandanas she’d sewn onto the bottom with a rubber band to give it a “genie-style” look.

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