Katherine Jackson, Michael's mother, talks:

"My grandparents and great-grandparents were cotton farmers. Their ancestors were slaves. One of them, great-great-grandfather Kendall Brown, was renowned for his singing voice. His voice would ring from about all the others during Sunday services in the little wooden church he attended nearby Russell county. His voice was so strong that, in the summer, when they threw open the wooden windows, it rang throughout the little valley in which the church was nestled. Well, maybe singing talent is in our blood. I thought when my mother related this story to me.

Taking into account my family's distant pass, it seems only fitting that my parents, Prince Scruse and Marta Upshaw, tied the knot on the Alabama holiday known as Emancipation day - May 28, 1929. They were attending one of the celebrations in the park when they decided to slip away and get married.

I was the first child, born May 4, 1930, in the little house where they were living in at the time in Barbour Country, about ten miles from Rutherford."

Katherine Jackson in the book My Family, The Jacksons.