Like many across the world, I watched the home going service for Michael Jackson (MJ) on TV, who Barry Gordy aptly coined during the service, the greatest entertainer of all time. I did not plan to watch it but after tuning in on CNN. I quickly saw that this was a global history making event. As a historian the images of MJ and the Jackson Five at the start of their career in the 1960s and stories about how the group got its break captivated me. Before the 1970s, black groups like the Jackson Five and entertainers like James Brown, Ray Charles, and Gladys Knight made their living on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” a string of black-owned honky-tonks, nightclubs, and more elaborate theaters. The circuit weaved throughout the Southeast and Midwest, stretching from Nashville to Chicago, to the Jackson’s hometown of Gary, Indiana, and into New York. The Jacksons would have often done consecutive one-night stands, frequently more than 800 miles apart. The routine went: drive for hours, stop, set up, play for five hours, breakdown, and drive for several more hours. On the road, performers often settled for sandwiches from the coloured window of segregated restaurants until they arrived at the next venue. The Chitlin’ Circuit was crucial to artists like the Jacksons because it was the only way to perform when the white media did not cover black artists. The entertainers called it the Chitlin’ Circuit because club owners sold chitlin’s and other soul food dishes out of their kitchens. Early in her career, Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit where she played at “roadside joints and honky-tonks across the South,” she recalled. “No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters, or pig ear sandwiches in a corner.” The circuit went beyond small hole-in-the-wall clubs, however. Elaborate African-American-operated theaters like the Regent in Washington, D.C., the Uptown in Philadelphia, the Apollo in New York, the Fox in Detroit, and the Regal in Chicago, were big-time venues considered part of the circuit. In a TV interview last night with Barbara Walters, Gladys Knight recalled seeing the Jackson Five for the first time at the Regal in Chicago and immediately calling Motown’s Barry Gordy telling him he had to audition them. In short, theatres on the circuit were particularly important to black artists like MJ who were not given the opportunity to play in mainstream venues because of racist whites in the entertainment business. Because MJ made it look so easy, most of us forgot just how hard it was for him and the Jackson Five when they started so many decades ago.
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