Most people know Katherine Jackson as the mother at the center of one of the most famous families in music. She’s the woman nine children called Mom, including a shy little boy named Michael who grew up to be the King of Pop.
But long before any of her sons sang a note on a real stage, Katherine had a dream of her own.
She was born in Alabama in 1930, and polio as a small child left her with a limp she carried for life. None of that dimmed the music in her. She loved it from the very start.
As a girl, she already knew what she wanted. She played clarinet and piano, and later picked up the cello too. She joined her school band and her school orchestra. Music wasn’t something she dabbled in on the side. It was the thing she loved most in the world.
And she had a clear picture of where she hoped it might take her.
Here’s the part most fans have never heard. As a girl, Katherine wanted to be a country singer. Some accounts say she dreamed of acting too. But country was her first love, the sound she reached for, and she could picture herself up on a stage singing it.
Then she noticed something that stopped her. She looked at the country stars of her day and could not find a single famous Black performer among them. That absence discouraged her, and little by little she let the dream go.
The music, though, never left her.
When she and her husband Joe were young and just starting out in Gary, Indiana, Katherine would sing while Joe played his guitar in the evenings. Joe and his brother Luther even had an R&B band of their own, the Falcons, playing clubs around town to earn a little extra, so music ran all through the house. Years later, with a home full of children, Katherine sang harmonies with her boys around the kitchen table. To help make ends meet she worked part-time at the Sears store in town, then came back and sang some more.
Those kitchen-table harmonies turned out to be something special. They were where some of the most famous voices in the world first learned to blend, Jackie and Tito and Jermaine and Marlon and little Michael among them.
The dream Katherine set down as a girl didn’t fade away. It simply moved to the next generation. The singer she once hoped to become, her children became many times over, and she got to stand back and watch every bit of it happen.
Take a look through the photos below to follow the whole story: young Katherine and Joe in Gary in the 1950s, Katherine gathered with her sons around the piano, and the proud mother years later at the family events she never stopped loving.