Michael Jackson was not the first to do a moonwalk

Bill Bailey the tap dancer was Pearl Bailey’s brother.

See this clip from YouTube: Bill Bailey from 1955 – Is the Moonwalk this old?.

Ah, yes. I remember that.

Has Michael ever given Dr. Beckett proper credit?

OK, now that was a moonwalk. It’s just at the very end of the clip, for the impatient among you.

Which leaves me wondering why it became such a sensation when Jackson did it, since the clip shows it had been done before.

Michael Jackson isn’t a particularly innovative dancer. Brilliant, yes, but all of his moves are copped from James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - dude can dance his ass off.

In the mid-70s he was doing the robot, again, a move that street dancers had been doing for years. I will give him full credit for three moves: the popping up on his toes that he does at the end of the moonwalk on the Motown 25 special (in his biography, Moonwalk, he said he cried for two days because he did not stay on his toes as long as he had hoped); the leg-kick thing he does throughout “Thriller,” and the crazy leaning forward move from “Smooth Criminal,” which I think I’d seen before, but definitely not very often.

Oh! I forgot the last one…

THE CROTCH GRAB! As well as the mark 2 version, where he outlines a shapely woman and starts air-humping her (as seen in “The Way You Make Me Feel” video).

I don’t know where that clip was from, but Jackson was one of the most famous people in the world, doing it on a huge television special at a time when there was no easy access to older clips. People understandably forget today that as recently as the 1980s, old movies were extremely hard to see and old television shows absolutely impossible. Why should people even remember that someone had done a similar step 30 years earlier - before much of the audience was born - when there was exactly zero visual evidence of it?

You cannot overstate what a different world it is today with the availability of the past for easy access.

Michael Jackson was the first one I’d seen doing the Moonwalk, but I can believe it was a variant of some sort of street dance. Wasn’t seen in Texas before he did it, so he was the one who at least popularized. it.