Most parents would do almost anything to keep a sleeping child asleep. Katherine Jackson was different, at least when one particular man showed up on the family TV.
Katherine is Michael Jackson’s mother. Before the Jackson 5 moved to California, she raised her big family in a small house in Gary, Indiana. Michael’s dad, Joe, had his own way of filling that house with music. Michael remembered it like this: “I’m a guy who used to sit in my living room and listen to my father play Ray Charles.”
His mother had a different gift for him. She knew who her son wanted to see more than anybody.
That was James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and Michael’s biggest dance hero.
Michael told this story to Bryan Monroe of Ebony magazine for the magazine’s December 2007 cover story. NPR called it a rare print interview. It came out as “Thriller” was turning 25, and Michael was talking about how grateful he still felt for his career.
“But I feel grateful, all those record-breaking things, to the biggest albums, to those No. 1s, I still feel grateful,” he said.
Then he went back to the very beginning.
Nobody knows exactly which James Brown broadcast Katherine woke her son for. This is an example of the kind of TV appearance the Godfather of Soul was making in the 1960s. It comes from one of his 1966 visits to The Ed Sullivan Show.
James Brown on 1960s TV, an example of what young Michael saw
Now here’s the part Michael carried with him. His mother didn’t wait for a convenient hour. Whenever James Brown was on, she went and got her little boy, even if that meant 3 in the morning.
Here are Michael’s own words: “My mother used to wake me up at 3 in the morning, ‘Michael, he’s on TV, he’s on TV!’ I’d run to the TV and James Brown would be on TV. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.'”
He was just a little boy, standing in front of the family TV in the middle of the night.
Michael spoke about James Brown in other interviews too. In this fan-uploaded clip from his 1993 interview with Oprah, he shares his thoughts on the man in his own words.
Michael talks about James Brown with Oprah in 1993
Decades after those late-night wake-up calls, the boy from Gary got to honor his hero on a big stage. In 2003 Michael walked on stage at the BET Awards to hand James Brown his Lifetime Achievement Award.
Michael presents James Brown with his award at the 2003 BET Awards
The two of them were also caught on camera together behind the scenes that same night.
Michael and James Brown backstage at the 2003 BET Awards
By the time of the Ebony interview, Michael was raising kids of his own. His youngest, then 5 and called Blanket (he goes by Bigi now), sat nearby watching cartoons. When the boy was slow to shake hands because he was holding a fistful of LifeSavers candy, Ebony’s Joy T. Bennett heard Michael tell him, “No, stand up and use THAT hand.”
So one interview gives you both sides of it. There’s Katherine at the TV in Gary, and there’s Michael at home teaching his own little boy.