Michael Jackson sold more records than almost anyone who ever lived. He had the dance moves, the glove, the sold out stadiums. But when he sat down to write about where it all started, he didn’t begin with a stage or a record deal.
He began with his mother.
Katherine Jackson raised nine children in a small house in Gary, Indiana, and Michael was the baby boy of the family. In his 1988 book “Moonwalk,” the only autobiography he ever wrote, he dedicated his albums to her and tried to put into words what she gave him. The very first thing he reached for wasn’t a lesson or a piece of advice. It was a sound.
“My first memories are of her holding me and singing songs like ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Cotton Fields,'” he wrote.
Think about that for a second. The man who recorded “Thriller” and “Billie Jean” said the earliest thing he could remember was his mom rocking him and singing an old folk song that half the country grew up on.
Those weren’t random songs. Michael explained that Katherine grew up in Alabama, and down there it was just as common for families to be raised on country and western music on the radio as it was to hear spirituals at church. She carried that music north with her. And she never let go of it. “She likes Willie Nelson to this day,” Michael wrote, talking about the country legend whose voice has been on the radio for more than fifty years.
So the King of Pop’s lullabies were country songs. That surprises a lot of folks.
Katherine wasn’t just a singer around the house either. She played the clarinet and the piano, and she taught Michael’s oldest sister, Rebbie, to play. Music was simply part of the air in that home, long before any of the Jacksons became famous.
Michael knew exactly where his gift came from. He never took the credit for himself.
“She has always had a beautiful voice and I suppose I got my singing ability from my mother and, of course, from God,” he wrote.
There’s no old film of Katherine singing over his crib. Moments like that happened long before anyone thought to point a camera at the Jackson family. What we have instead are the family photos, the ones of a young mother and the little boy who would grow up to change music forever, and a few quiet pages in his own book where he finally told the world who taught him to sing.
So the next time you hear “You Are My Sunshine,” remember that one of the greatest voices of all time first heard it the same way you probably did. From his mother, holding him close.