Katherine Jackson walked into the room and found her baby on the floor. Michael was in his diaper with his little bottle, and he was dancing. Nobody had put on a record. The radio was off. Something in that small house in Gary, Indiana, had a beat, and the baby had found it before anyone else did.
The house was 2300 Jackson Street, and it was tiny. It had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a small utility room. Michael and his four older brothers slept in stacked bunk beds in one bedroom, and the girls slept in the living room. Money was short. “Every year we would buy a quarter of a cow or half of a cow and keep it in the freezer,” Katherine said in 2013, as reported by CNN.
Music didn’t cost a thing, so the house was full of it. The family TV would break down, and sometimes there was no money to get it fixed. On those nights Katherine gathered the kids and they sang. “We would sing together, sing old country songs, folk songs,” she said.
Michael joined in long before he could talk. When the older kids danced around the house, Katherine would be holding the baby, and he’d be bouncing right along with them. “When all the kids were dancing around, he was in my arms, and he couldn’t be still,” she said. “He was born that way.”
So the day she found him on the floor, the dancing didn’t surprise her. What he was dancing to did.
It was the washing machine. The family kept an old Maytag in that little utility room, and it was anything but quiet. “We had a Maytag washing machine, and it was rickety when the agitators would go,” Katherine told Dateline NBC in 2010. She didn’t just describe the noise. She made it, right there in the interview.
In 2013 she spelled it out again, as CNN reported. “It would make a rhythm noise, like ‘squeaky, squeaky, katum, katum,'” she said. To everyone else in the house, that was the sound of laundry. To baby Michael, it was a groove.
“Michael was there on the floor wearing his diaper and his little bottle,” she told Dateline, “and he just was dancing to the rhythm of what the washing machine made.” In 2013 she pictured the same scene again, with her son “sucking his bottle to the squeaking of the washer.”
She never needed anyone to explain it to her. “He just loved music, and he loved to dance,” she said.
The rickety Maytag kept squeaking in Gary, and the baby on the floor kept moving. By 1974 he was a teenager doing the robot on national TV, singing lead on a Jackson 5 hit that went to No. 2 in America. The song was called “Dancing Machine.”
We couldn’t find a clip of Katherine telling this story online, so the two videos below show the house and the boy instead.
The Jacksons sing about the house at 2300 Jackson Street
This is the official 1989 video for “2300 Jackson Street,” a song the family named after the Gary house’s address. Most of the Jacksons appear in it, singing together about the home they grew up in.
Teenage Michael does the robot to “Dancing Machine”
In this official clip from The Carol Burnett Show, Michael sings lead on “Dancing Machine” with his brothers and breaks into the robot. It’s the same boy who once danced on the floor in his diaper, now doing it for a TV audience.