Jerry Macon was the first audience that Michael Jackson ever had.

Jerry’s mother, Leola, was best friends with Michael’s mother Katherine, or Kate, from the Jehovah’s Witness church. The Macons would go and watch the Jackson boys perform in their tiny living room — before Michael Jackson even began to sing.

“Me and my mother used to go over to their house and we used to watch them practise,” Mr Macon told The Times. “I remember when they first started practising, he used to play the bongos. “They would be playing a song and he would be playing the bongos and he would put them down and get up and dance. He was about five years old.

“He wasn’t dancing like he was dancing later, but he was a good dancer,” he said. That was before he even started singing,” he said.

I knew he was going to be somebody because of the way he would play them bongos and just get up and start dancing. To me, it just seemed like he had more talent than his brothers.”

Mr Macon, 53, is now a pistol-packing appliance repairman in the “Rust Belt” town of Gary, Indiana, once dubbed “the Murder Capital of America”. He still lives just blocks from the rickety white bungalow where Kate and Joseph Jackson, a crane driver at a steel mill, raised their nine children — the girls sleeping in bunk beds in one room, and the boys all in another.

Jackson’s death has undammed a flood of nostalgia for better times in the steel town just outside Chicago, now full of abandoned buildings and ravaged by drugs and crime.

Residents have left dozens of teddybears in front of the Jacksons’ old home — a ritual copied, some say, from the makeshift memorials to local murder victims. Jackson’s old block has become a street party, with fans dressing up as the King of Pop and moonwalking to Thriller.

Jackson was a micro-star in Gary long before he became a superstar elsewhere. The Jackson 5 performed at clubs, school dances and even busked in their backyard.

“We would see him dancing on the corner,” recalled Cynthia Addison, 60, who lives near the Jacksons’ old home at 2300 Jackson Street (named after President Andrew Jackson).

“When kids were going to the store, they would say, ‘Hey Mike, dance for us. He would do a few steps for them.”

Jeffrey Hurt, 53, played Little League baseball with the Jackson boys at the ground across the street from the family’s bungalow.

Times Recommends

• Over the Wall
• Why Africa welcomes the ‘new colonialism’
• Which will come out on top: paper or gold?