The Jacksons and Sister Sledge

How exactly do you sum up one of the most successful careers in pop music history in a few paragraphs? It’s something I’ll have to learn pretty quickly cos in the Jacksons, I’m dealing with a group that’s iconic in the literal sense. They were one of the first African-American musical groups to have crossover success after The Supremes, The Four Tops and The Temptations and are still performing to this day. Clearly, I have a lot to cover.

The story begins in 1964, when Joe Jackson caught his son Tito breaking a string on the former’s guitar. Tito managed to fix the string and, before his father could punish him, played him some of what he’d been learning. His father was so impressed he bought Tito his own guitar to play on and with that; the first seeds of The Jackson Five were sewn.

Tito then started jamming with his brothers Jermaine and Jackie, who had shown an interest in singing as well, and six year old Michael started joining in on the congas. Their father named them The Jackson Brothers and they were soon playing live anywhere that’ll have them. In the following years the group cut their teeth playing dive bars and talent shows, and by 1967 they were signed to Steeltown Records after Motown rejected their demo tape.

After a couple more years of constant performing and rehearsing, the group finally got a true audition with Motown in the summer of 1968. By early 1969 they were signed and they were about to drop the mother of all debut singles. “I Want You Back” was an instant smash, a debut single reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two on the UK Singles chart.

This peak was equalled by their next three singles, making them the first act in pop music history to achieve such a feat. They were essentially the biggest pop act in the country within two years, releasing three studio albums in 1970 and a further two in 1971. Jacksonmania was in full swing and Michael was at the centre of it as the bands lead singer, even though he was barely twelve years old at the time.

Also in 1971, Motown started preparing a solo career for Michael. The rest, they say is history. While Michael became the biggest name in music, the band struggled on alongside him. He never officially left the band until 1984, when he’d already recorded the biggest selling album of all time with Thriller. With that, the jig was up. A final album, “2300 Jackson Street” was released in 1989 and tanked, so the group quietly split.

Until 2012, however. In the aftermath of Michael’s death, the remaining Jackson brothers reunited and went on the Unity Tour, and they’ve barely left the road since. When you’ve got a back catalogue like that it’s a crime to keep people from listening to it performed live. Over two decades since their formation and they still put on an amazing show.

Sister Sledge were made up of the four daughters of famed Broadway tap-dancer Edwin Sledge and the actress Florez Sledge. Debbie, Joni, Kathy and Kim were not protégé’s of their parents, however, as they were given singing lessons by their grandmother, an ex lyric soprano opera singer called Viola Williams. The quartet cut their teeth performing live at church gatherings, before forming a band together (called Mrs. Williams’ Grandchildren, no less) and by 1971, they had embarked on their first tour all over the East Coast of the USA. Soon after they started building up a following thanks to their live performances, the band changed their name to Sister Sledge, and released “Time Will Tell”, their first single, in the same year.

Strangely enough, it was in the U.K that the band saw their first big success, with their single “Mama Never Told Me” hitting the top twenty of the singles chart. However, the best was yet to come. The band spent most of the seventies enjoying reasonable success all over the world, and even scored a huge hit in Japan with “Love Don’t Go Through No Changes On Me”. They’d had enough initial success to score a record deal with Atlantic Records but they weren’t capitalizing on it. That is, until the company pared the band with Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards of the band Chic. Immediately the pairing paid off, with their single “He’s The Greatest Dancer” hurtling into the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100.

This paled in comparison to the follow up, however. The title track to their 1979 album “We Are Family” was an enormous smash hit all over the world, peaking at number two on the Hot 100. This propelled the album into a top three spot on the Billboard 200 and it was eventually certified Platinum in the U.S and Gold in the U.K. The band weren’t able to keep up that level of success in the U.S but spent the rest of the 1980’s as a huge name in the U.K. They were even able to beat the chart success of “We Are Family” twice over there, with 1984’s number four single “Lost In Music” and the following year’s number one hit “Frankie”. However, all the success in the world wasn’t enough to keep Kathy from leaving the group in 1989.

Fortunately, the split was very amicable, and not only did the band continue to have a few more hit singles in the U.K after she left, but she’s joined them for sporadic shows and releases in the 90’s and 2000’s. We’re living in the age of “Uptown Funk”, and so far it’s proving to be a pretty deathless hit. Hopefully, it’ll revive interest in the late seventies and early 80’s disco and funk that inspired it, and if you’re interested, then you can’t do much better than checking out one of that era’s finest groups, Sister Sledge. Highly recommended.