TJ Jackson grew up in a house where the family business was music, so it’s no surprise he and his brothers wanted in.
TJ is the youngest of Tito Jackson’s three sons. Tito was Michael Jackson’s brother, one of the singing Jacksons, and his boys grew up wanting to be just like their dad and their uncles. TJ, short for Tito Joe, was born in 1978. His older brothers are Taj, born in 1973, and Taryll, born in 1975.
In 2022, TJ sat down with French author Brice Najar and told the whole story of how the three of them became a band. It starts with a mop.
TJ was 5 during the Jacksons’ 1984 Victory Tour, and he remembers the family playing Dodger Stadium “for 7 nights.” When the boys got home, they couldn’t stop pretending.
TJ told Najar that “my father always says he remembers us coming home and performing with brooms and mopes, acting as if we were The Jacksons!”
So there they were, three little kids with brooms and mops, doing their dad’s moves at home. Tito would laugh and correct their steps. Then he gave them a piece of advice that stuck.
“You guys have to do your own thing! It’s very sweet that you do our music, but make your own music and if you really want to be musicians, do it yourself!”
They took him at his word. And when it came time to pick a name, they didn’t have to look far.
It came from their mom.
With three boys in the house, calling each one by name got old fast. “Our mom would call us the 3T’s when she wanted us,” TJ said. Instead of saying each of their names, she’d call out, “3T’s, come downstairs!” or “3T’s, it’s time for dinner!”
Every family has a nickname like that, the one Mom yells up the stairs. For Tito’s boys, it turned into a band name.
Then Uncle Michael heard it.
When TJ was about 15, Michael gave them one note. “You should drop the ‘s and just go with 3T. It’s stronger that way, it’s cooler.”
That was it. One letter gone. And the boys didn’t argue.
“Whenever my uncle said something like that, we went with it and he was right!” TJ said.
Michael kept helping in small ways after that. When it was time to choose photos for their album cover, he circled the ones he liked, and TJ remembered that “whenever our uncle Michael said ‘This is the one’, we listened.”
That first album, “Brotherhood,” came out in 1995 and sold about three million copies around the world. Its first single, “Anything,” became an international hit, and the video is the best way to see what the three brothers with the broom-and-mop routine grew into.
Taj, Taryll and TJ in their first big hit as 3T
Watch it and remember where the name on the screen came from. A mom calling her sons to dinner, and an uncle who knew that one letter less would sound better.
Tito passed away in September 2024. TJ still tells the story of how his dad laughed at their broom-and-mop show and then told them to go make their own music, which is exactly what they went and did.