Katherine Jackson raised nine children in a small house in Gary, Indiana. She’s Michael’s mother, and even after he became the most famous singer alive she always talked about him as her boy first. Years later she sat down with NBC’s “Dateline” and told a story from before any of the fame, back when Michael was little and the two of them had a quiet habit at home.
They used to watch TV together, lying on the floor.
“We, Michael and I, would lay there on the floor watching TV,” she remembered. One evening the news came on, and it showed children who were hungry and had nothing. Little Michael went quiet. Then he looked up at his mom.
Here’s how Katherine told it. “Michael would look up at me and said, ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘one day… I’m going to do something about this.'”
She never forgot that. He was just a kid. Most kids say a thing like that and then go back to the cartoons. Michael didn’t.
The best person to hear this from is Katherine herself. In this interview she talks about her son the way only a mother can, including that night on the floor.
Katherine Jackson remembers the promise young Michael made her
So what did that little boy grow up to do about it?
In 1985 Michael got together with the singer Lionel Richie and wrote a song. The idea came after he saw news footage of hungry people in Ethiopia and Sudan, the same kind of pictures that had stopped him cold as a boy. The song was “We Are the World.” Dozens of the biggest names in American music packed into one studio to sing it in a single night. It went straight to No. 1 and won four Grammys, and people still sing it today.
Before any of that though, before the famous faces and the big studio, there was a much smaller moment.
Michael wrote in his book “Moonwalk” that he liked to try a new melody out on his younger sister Janet, who’s a singer too. He’d take her into a quiet room, hum the tune with no words yet, and ask her what she pictured. “I’d say, ‘Janet, what do you see? What do you see when you hear this sound?'” This time Janet described the children of Africa. That, Michael said, is where “We Are the World” came from.
That quiet hum, and the promise he’d made his mom on the floor years before, turned into a song the whole world ended up learning by heart.
Here’s the one his promise became.
“We Are the World,” the song that promise turned into
Katherine got to watch all of it happen. The little boy who looked up at her on the living room floor grew up and kept his word, and she was right there to see it. If you want to hear her tell it in her own voice, her interview is worth a few minutes of your evening.