It started with a knock on the door. Not a polite one, either. Billy Gilman remembers it as “a frantic knock on my door like not a normal knock,” and there was his mother with the phone in her hand.
“She’s gone white as a ghost,” he said in an interview the Sarah O’Connell Show posted on YouTube in November 2022. “Michael Jackson is on the phone.”
Billy was no stranger to the music business by then. He was the boy with the big voice whose debut album, “One Voice,” came out in June 2000 and went double platinum. At 11 he’d become the youngest artist ever to put a single in the Top 40 of the country chart, and “One Voice” earned him a Grammy nomination. He was used to radio stations and award shows. He wasn’t used to the King of Pop ringing the family phone.
So the Gilmans did what most families would do. They decided somebody was messing with them.
“Someone got our phone number, it’s a joke, someone’s playing a prank,” Billy said, describing what went through his head.
He told the whole story years later, sitting at home with a piano and a 2001 country award behind him.
Billy Gilman tells the phone call story on the Sarah O’Connell Show
This is an interview uploaded by the Sarah O’Connell Show on its own channel, not a fan reupload. It covers his whole career, from “One Voice” to his 2016 run on “The Voice,” where he finished as runner-up. Billy starts the story at about 15:04, the phone call itself comes at about 15:39 and he has wrapped it up by about 17:30.
Here’s how the call actually went.
“The gentleman said, ‘This is Michael Jackson,'” Billy told Sarah O’Connell. “I went, ‘Yup, and I’m the king of England.’ Literally said those words and I hung up the phone.”
That was it. The kid who sang “One Voice” had just hung up on Michael Jackson. He reaches that line at about 16:19 in the video.
The phone rang again. This time it was a woman. “This woman said, ‘Hello, this is Evie, Michael Jackson’s assistant,'” Billy said, “and I went, ‘I am so, so sorry.'”
Apparently he wasn’t the first. “She’s like, ‘This happens all the time,'” Billy said.
Then she got to the reason for the call. Michael was putting together two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York to mark 30 years since his first solo record, and he had a request. “He wanted to, you know, personally ask if I would sing on one of the shows,” Billy said.
His reply was simple. “I said, ‘Of course, I love the song “Ben,”‘” he remembered at about 17:04. As he put it: “Who doesn’t idolize Michael Jackson? I mean, this is a level above another level.”
The song he picked
Michael recorded “Ben” for Motown in 1972, and it became his first No. 1 single in the US as a solo artist. He was 14 at the time. Billy was 13 when he stood up at the Garden to sing it.
The concerts took place on September 7 and 10, 2001, and Billy sang “Ben” on both nights. On the Friday show he came on right after Marlon Brando’s speech.
CBS put the two nights together into a two-hour special, “Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration,” and aired it on November 13, 2001, 25 years ago today. Nielsen estimated that 45 million people watched all or part of it.
When Rolling Stone looked back at the performance in 2014, its headline called Billy’s “Ben” a “pitch-perfect cover.”