Katherine Jackson had her eighth child in a two-bedroom house on Gary, Indiana's Jackson Street on August 29, 1958; eleven years later, Motown sold the world a story about who found him that left out the label that signed him first.

Katherine Jackson had her eighth child in a two-bedroom house on Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, on August 29, 1958. What that house did not have, with seven children already living in it, was room to spare.

How many people fit in two bedrooms?

Joseph and Katherine Jackson would eventually raise ten children in that house: Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Michael, Randy and Janet, plus a twin brother of Marlon's who died shortly after birth. Gary itself was a company town, built up around U.S. Steel's Gary Works at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, and Joseph worked there as a crane operator. He had boxed as a younger man and played guitar on the side in a local rhythm and blues outfit called the Falcons, a career that went nowhere and left him, by most accounts, watching for a second chance in his sons instead.

He found it early. Michael was already singing backup with his brothers by age five, and by 1965 he had taken over lead vocals in the family group his father had assembled and named the Jackson 5.

Why did their father run rehearsals like a drill sergeant?

Joseph rehearsed the boys for hours after school, every night, and kept a belt within reach for a missed step or a flubbed lyric. Michael talked about it in interview after interview, decades later, without much softening: "My father would rehearse with a belt in his hand. You couldn't mess up." Whatever it cost the children privately, it produced a stage act tight enough to win the Apollo Theater's amateur night in 1967, opening for James Brown and Gladys Knight along the way.

What was the first record anyone could actually buy?

A Gary-based label called Steeltown Records, run by a local promoter named Gordon Keith, put out the group's first single, "Big Boy," in January 1968. Michael was nine. The brothers split three cents a copy sold, six ways among the five of them and their drummer, and a distribution deal with Atlantic Records that spring carried it past 10,000 copies nationally.

It never cracked the Billboard charts, and nobody at Motown had noticed it yet.

Was Diana Ross really the one who found them?

Motown's official version, repeated in press materials and immortalized in the title of the group's 1969 debut album, Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5, was that Ross had personally discovered the brothers and brought them to Berry Gordy's attention. It made a tidy story: a superstar spotting the next one.

It wasn't true, or at least not the whole of it. The Jackson 5 had already been introduced to Motown by Bobby Taylor, a singer with the label's group Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, who caught their act and pushed for an audition months before Ross entered the picture. Gordy signed the group in 1969 and built the marketing campaign he wanted anyway, letting Ross's fame do work that a Gary steel town and an unknown talent scout could not. Motown's own later releases (reissues, documentaries, retrospectives) have quietly credited Taylor alongside Ross over the years, though the album title itself was never reissued under a different name.

The group made its national television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on December 14, 1969, performing "I Want You Back" alongside "Stand!" and "Who's Loving You." The single, released two months earlier, reached number one within weeks. It was the first of four consecutive Jackson 5 singles to top the Billboard Hot 100: "ABC," "The Love You Save" and "I'll Be There" followed in quick succession, a run no act had managed before.

Then came the reinvention.

Michael's solo career eventually swallowed the group that raised it. Off the Wall, produced with Quincy Jones in 1979, gave him his first run of solo hits; Thriller, released on November 30, 1982, became the best-selling album in the world, a title it still holds by most tallies more than four decades later.

The moonwalk arrived the following spring. During Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, a television special taped in March 1983 to mark the label's twenty-fifth anniversary, Jackson performed "Billie Jean" and slid backward across the stage in a move borrowed from street dancers and rechristened on the spot. It aired that May to roughly a third of American television households and turned a dance step into the single most imitated gesture in pop music.

Elizabeth Taylor gave him the title that outlasted the decade. Presenting him with a Heritage Award at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, she called him "the true king of pop, rock and soul"; only the first three words stuck, and Jackson's own team pushed broadcasters to use them whenever his videos aired.

What about the years the songs don't cover?

Fame this large does not stay uncomplicated, and Jackson's later life carried real controversy alongside the records. He faced child molestation allegations twice, in 1993 and again in 2003, and stood trial in Santa Barbara County on the second set of charges; a jury acquitted him on all fourteen counts on June 13, 2005. He never fully answered, in the years that followed, the questions the allegations left behind, and reasonable people still disagree about how to weigh an acquittal against the accusations that produced it. Jackson died in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009, of acute propofol intoxication administered by his physician, Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter two years later and served just under two years of a four-year sentence.

None of that has slowed the house on Jackson Street. The two-bedroom home where it all started still stands, still owned by the Jackson family, and Indiana Landmarks proposed it for the National Register of Historic Places in May 2024. Fans still make the drive to Gary to stand outside it, the way earlier generations detoured through Memphis or Liverpool, looking for the ordinary rooms an extraordinary noise once came from.

Sources

• Biography.com, "Michael Jackson: Biography, Musician, Dancer, Grammy Winner"
• Wikipedia, "Michael Jackson," "Michael Jackson Childhood Home," "Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5," "I Want You Back," "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever" and "Death of Michael Jackson"
• Yahoo Entertainment, "58 Years Ago, the Jackson 5 Signed with Motown and Changed Music Forever"
• Chicago Reader, "The Jackson Find" (on Steeltown Records and "Big Boy")
• ScreenRant, "How Michael Jackson Got The Nickname 'The King Of Pop'"
• NPR and Al Jazeera coverage of the June 2005 trial verdict