The phone never stayed quiet for long at Diana Ross’s house, and her daughter Tracee was often the one who announced who was on the line. “Mom, it’s Marvin! Mom, it’s Michael,” she said on Keke Palmer’s podcast this summer, acting out the way she used to yell it as a kid. Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson called “all the time,” she told Keke, as theGrio reported in July 2026.
Michael wasn’t just a famous voice on the phone. He was part of the family’s life. “There’s pictures, it’s very sweet, of my mom, my dad, Cher and Michael playing tennis,” Tracee told James Corden on SiriusXM in 2024, as People reported.
Then came “Thriller.” The album landed in late 1982, and its opening track, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” was soon everywhere. Tracee, who’d grow up to star in “black-ish,” was about 10. Kids at her school were singing it too, and Tracee was sure she knew how one line really went. She told her classmates she had the real words, and she had a reason they couldn’t argue with. She knew Michael.
She got her chance to prove it one night at bedtime. Her mom was on the phone with him and was about to wrap up the call. “Does anyone want to talk to Michael before I hang up?” Diana asked, as Tracee remembered it for Keke. When she told Corden the story two years earlier, she put it as “Does anyone wanna say goodnight to Michael before I hang up the phone?”
Either way, Tracee said yes. She took the phone and went straight to business. “Michael, everybody at school…” she began. Then she sang him the line the way she’d been singing it: “I’ve been saved by the sound of Michael’s song.” And she asked him if that’s what he was singing.
A 10-year-old had staked her reputation at school on his answer, and now she was waiting on the line. “I’m not, but it should be,” Michael told her, as she recalled it on Keke’s show.
In 2024 she remembered the words a little differently. “He said, ‘No, but it should have been,'” she told Corden. “That’s my favorite memory there.”
It was a no, and it was also a compliment. The biggest star in the world told a little girl she’d gotten his song wrong and made her version sound like an improvement in the same breath. More than 40 years later, she has told the story on two different shows, and both times she saved his answer for last.
Tracee Ellis Ross tells the bedtime phone story on Keke Palmer’s show
Tracee does her “Mom, it’s Michael” impression at about 6:27. The bedtime call starts at about 8:07, and she gets to Michael’s answer before the 8:50 mark.
Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” (official audio)
This is the song Tracee sang to Michael over the phone, the opening track of “Thriller,” from Michael’s official channel. Michael wrote it himself, and the single reached No. 5 in the US in 1983. The line Tracee sang him that night still isn’t in it.