“This is the house we grew up in,” one of the Jackson brothers says, and the camera follows three of them inside.
The house is a small white one at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana. Marlon, Jackie and Jermaine went back to it together for Entertainment Tonight, in a piece the show posted on April 17, 2026. The captions on the video don’t label which brother is talking, so the quotes here are credited the way the clip leaves them: to one of the brothers.
“This house was pretty much the beginning of who we became,” one of them says in the first few seconds. He lists what the family took from it, the morals and the principles among them, and says twice that “it all started here.”
It didn’t start with much room. Entertainment Tonight’s narrator describes the place as a 672-square-foot bungalow with two bedrooms, and adds that it’s rare to see inside, because the home has become a tourist stop but isn’t open to visitors. Katherine Jackson raised nine children there. Her sons remember it differently from how it measures.
“It was a big house to us,” one brother says at about 1:12, after admitting he can’t believe how small it looks now. “We had fun in it.”
Watch Marlon, Jackie and Jermaine Jackson walk through their childhood home in Gary
This is Entertainment Tonight’s official upload. The walk through the house runs from about 0:02 to 2:12, and one of the brothers tells how the singing started at about 0:32.
So how did a house that size produce a group? By the brothers’ own account in 2026, nobody planned it. Something stopped working, and there was no cash to get it going again.
“My mom, our television broke,” one of the brothers says. “And we didn’t have the money to fix it. So, she started singing country western songs with us. We started harmonizing.”
Then he gives his mother’s words to her husband, exactly as he remembers them: “Joe, your boys can sing.”
That’s the origin story as her sons tell it. No talent scout came to Gary and no one sat the boys down for lessons. A set went dark, a mother sang country western songs with her boys, and she liked what she heard enough to tell their father.
Joe Jackson was a crane operator at a steel company, and he acted on it. “After he heard us sing, he took extra shifts at the steel mill and start buying equipment,” a brother says at about 0:45. The living room turned into a rehearsal space. “I don’t know how my father moved the furniture back and put our equipment up here,” he says.
The neighborhood noticed. Kids would be “in that window,” the same brother remembers, asking whether the boys could “come out to play.” Another voice in the room supplies the answer they always got: “Yeah, they got to rehearse.”
Play happened anyway, indoors. In the boys’ bedroom, at about 1:38, one of them explains the family basketball court. “We used to take hangers and make a basketball ring with it,” he says. The ring went on the door and the ball was a rolled-up sock. “A couple of socks,” he adds, and somebody else sums it up: “Hoops right in the bedroom.”
They also show the room where their mother and father slept, and a window one of them says somebody used to climb in and out of.
Near the two-minute mark, one of the brothers picks out two faces. “There is Michael and I,” he says. “That’s Michael. That’s me.” A few seconds later comes one more fact about the room all those boys shared: “And we had triple bunks.”