On 31 January 1970, a song called “I Want You Back” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The boy singing lead on it was 11 years, 155 days old. More than fifty-five years later, nobody has beaten that.
Michael Jackson remains the youngest artist ever to top the American chart, and the record does not look remotely likely to fall.
There is a beautiful accident of timing buried in it too. Billboard published its very first Hot 100 chart on 4 August 1958. Michael Jackson was born about three weeks later, on 29 August, which means that when he hit number one, he became the first singer to top the Hot 100 who was younger than the Hot 100 itself.
Every Time Michael Jackson Made History on the Billboard Charts
It is worth being precise about the record, because it gets muddled online. Michael is the youngest artist to top the chart, at 11. The youngest solo artist is Stevie Wonder, who was 13 years and 89 days old when “Fingertips Pt. 2” went to number one in 1963 — also, as it happens, on Motown. So both records sit with the same label, seven years apart.
What makes it more remarkable is how completely it worked. “I Want You Back” was the Jackson 5’s debut single for Motown, released in October 1969, and it entered the Hot 100 at a very unglamorous number 90. Then it climbed all the way, knocking off B.J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.” The chart around it that week is a snapshot of an era: Led Zeppelin, Tom Jones, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Elvis Presley all sitting in the top ten with him.
The Jackson 5 “I Want You Back” on The Ed Sullivan Show
Then they did it again. And again. And again. “I Want You Back” was followed by “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” — all four went to number one, making the Jackson 5 the first act in history whose first four chart entries all reached the top. Michael was 12 by the time the fourth one got there.
There is one detail in that run that reads like fate. On 25 April 1970, “ABC” knocked The Beatles’ “Let It Be” off the top of the Hot 100. Two months later, “The Love You Save” knocked off “The Long and Winding Road” — the Beatles’ final number one. The biggest group in the history of pop was on its way out, and the boy who would become the King of Pop was the one who pushed them off the summit. Twice.
He had been drilled for it. His father, Joe, had auditioned the brothers relentlessly before Motown signed them in 1968 and made sure the youngest was out front. Motown then media-trained the whole group, even instructing them for a while to tell a story about being discovered by Diana Ross. In interviews, Michael talked about basketball and catching lizards. He was, after all, in fifth grade. And he had the number one record in America.