Ask any Michael Jackson fan to name his mother and you’ll get the answer in a heartbeat. Katherine.
It’s the name she has carried through every chapter of the Jackson family story. She turned 96 on May 4 this year, and to millions of people she has always simply been Katherine Jackson, the calm, steady woman at the heart of one of the most famous families in music.
But Katherine wasn’t the name she was given as a baby. And the last name she grew up with wasn’t her first one either.
Most people pick up her story in Gary, Indiana. She married Joe Jackson in November 1949, and the couple settled into a small house at 2300 Jackson Street. That address is a landmark for fans now, and Chicago’s public TV station WTTW covered the day it got its own highway signs.
The Gary house where Katherine and Joe settled gets its own highway signs
To find the name she started out with, you have to go back further. And a long way south.
She came into the world on May 4, 1930, in Barbour County, Alabama. Her Biography.com profile lists her birthplace as the town of Clayton. Her parents were Martha Mattie Upshaw and Prince Albert Screws.
Read that last name again. Screws.
Here’s how Biography.com puts it, word for word: “Katherine Esther Jackson was born Kattie B. Screws on May 4, 1930”
So the little girl from Alabama began life as Kattie B. Screws. She wasn’t Katherine yet, and she wasn’t a Scruse either, even though that’s the maiden name most fans have seen next to hers.
Both changes came through her father. Prince Albert Screws changed the family surname to Scruse, and his daughter became Katherine Esther Scruse. Wikipedia dates the change to 1934, when she was about 4. That’s the same age she was when the family moved north to East Chicago, Indiana.
Why did he do it? None of the sources we read explain it, and we won’t guess. What we do know is that she got her new name around the same time she got a new hometown, far from the Alabama town where she was born.
That’s a lot for any little kid. She also had polio when she was very young, and it left her with a limp she has carried ever since.
Years later, Katherine Esther Scruse became Katherine Jackson, and the tiny house in Gary filled up with children and music. A fan filmed a tour of that childhood home in 2016, so you can see the place for yourself.
A fan’s 2016 tour of the Jackson family home in Gary
That address stuck with the family. The Jacksons later recorded a song named after it.
It’s funny to think about. Fans have said “Katherine” in interviews and documentaries for decades, and it was a name she only got at around age 4.
The baby born in Barbour County was Kattie. The world just never got to meet her by that name.