# Moonwalk (dance move) *The archive holds the moonwalk as a Black street and stage dance, refined in Black performance circuits and wrongly flattened into a single 1983 television moment.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: The Culture · Status: In review · Revised: July 22, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/moonwalk-dance-move-505c ## Questions this record answers - Who really invented the moonwalk dance move? - What were the Black street styles and performers behind Michael Jackson’s moonwalk? - How did the moonwalk travel from Black neighborhoods to global pop culture? - Why is the moonwalk’s origin often misattributed or simplified to one person? ## Summary The moonwalk is a backward‑gliding illusion step developed across Black social dance and performance circles long before its 1983 television showcase, authored collectively by Black dancers who experimented with backslide, float and glide techniques on sidewalks, talent shows and stage revues. Michael Jackson’s performance on Motown 25 crystallised a lineage into a single superstar image, but the move’s roots sit with earlier Black practitioners like tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, street and nightclub dancers identified with the “backslide,” and performers such as Jeffrey Daniel who carried the step from Los Angeles dance battles to television and stadium stages. ## Origins in Black social and street dance The archive situates the moonwalk in a continuum of Black movement that plays with weight, suspension and visual illusion, running from tap and soft‑shoe to popping, locking and boogaloo. Before it had a name in mass media, Black dancers in cities like Los Angeles and New York used a backward‑traveling glide in talent shows, basement parties and club floors, often calling it the “backslide” or “floating.” Oral histories in Black dance communities describe the move appearing in Soul Train line segments and local battles in the 1970s, as dancers competed to make their feet look frictionless while bodies stayed anchored. Black tap and jazz traditions already contained sliding and gliding motifs, teaching generations to play against gravity and ground. Performers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and later Sammy Davis Jr. integrated backward travel and light‑footed illusion into broader tap repertoires, seeding techniques that younger dancers watched, imitated and exaggerated. In this telling, the moonwalk is not a sudden invention but a named moment in a much older vocabulary. ## Stage refinement and televised transmission By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Black dancers working in commercial entertainment refined street backslides into sharper, camera‑ready illusions. British‑born, Los Angeles‑based dancer Jeffrey Daniel, whose training connected locking crews, club battles and studio work, performed a version of the backward glide on Soul Train in the early 1980s, bringing a neighborhood step onto nationally syndicated Black television. He and other choreographers then taught and adapted the move for recording artists, translating freestyle footwork into repeatable stage choreography. Michael Jackson’s Motown 25 performance of “Billie Jean” in 1983 showcased his own polished backslide, branded in publicity as the “moonwalk,” and broadcast it to a global mainstream audience. Jackson himself pointed to street and Soul Train dancers as sources, acknowledging that he learned from the Black dance world around him rather than originating the move alone. The archive holds that televised moment as a peak of refinement and charisma, not as origin. ## Naming, misattribution and erasure The term “moonwalk” attached to Jackson’s performance rather than to the decades of Black dance that produced the underlying technique, compressing a lineage of Black creators into one marketable figure. Pop histories, music‑industry publicity and fan culture often retell the story as if the step emerged fully formed with Jackson, erasing the Black street dancers and working performers whose craft made the illusion possible. Because many early originators worked in informal economies—dancing in clubs, neighborhood contests, and variety shows—they left few written records or enforceable intellectual property claims. Choreographic credit in television and pop tours followed the logics of entertainment law and celebrity branding, funneling recognition toward stars rather than toward the Black dancers whose bodies carried the innovation. The archive reads the absence of patents and bylines not as absence of authorship but as a trace of the system that rendered Black movement common property while selling its image. ## The archive’s footing The archive names the moonwalk as a Black collective creation, authored by generations of dancers who invented and perfected backward‑glide illusion within Black performance traditions. We hold individual exemplars—street dancers, Soul Train regulars, tap masters and choreographers—as makers whose names should be recovered where sources permit, but we resist collapsing the story into a single heroic origin. What became a universal pop‑culture reference began as Black neighborhood genius, staged and televised without the full roll call of its creators. ## Legacy in global popular culture Once the moonwalk entered global broadcast through Jackson and other performers, it became a common reference in videos, commercials, sports celebrations and internet culture. Children worldwide practiced the step on kitchen tiles and playground asphalt, often without knowing that they were tracing a path laid down by Black dancers whose communities had refined the physics of the illusion for decades. Later Black artists kept extending the form, combining moonwalks with slides, glides and animation techniques in music videos and battles. The archive holds the move as an emblem of how Black technique underwrites modern popular culture—ubiquitous yet rarely credited back to the street and stage communities that produced it. To reclaim the moonwalk’s origin is to restore Black dancers as authors of a global visual language, not merely as backup for its most famous wearer. ## Sources 1. Jacqui Malone, Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance, University of Illinois Press, 1996 2. Thomas F. DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/soul-train - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-internet-culture - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/sitcom-laugh-track - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/end-zone-celebration - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/popping-and-locking --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Moonwalk (dance move)," revised July 22, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/moonwalk-dance-move-505c Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.