# Moonwalk (dance move) *The archive holds the moonwalk as a Black social dance technique developed in mid‑20th‑century Black performance and street culture, later globalised and renamed through Michael Jackson’s 1983 performance.* > 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-89e4 ## Questions this record answers - Who really invented the moonwalk dance move? - What were the Black dance traditions behind Michael Jackson’s moonwalk? - How did street and social dancers shape the moonwalk before it reached television? - Why do different communities claim authorship of the moonwalk? ## Summary The moonwalk, the backward‑gliding illusion made famous by Michael Jackson in 1983, was built over decades by Black social dancers, street performers and stage artists long before it reached network television. Jackson’s Motown 25 performance named and globalised the move, but its mechanics trace to Black tap and jazz footwork, mid‑century pantomime, and the underground popping and boogaloo scenes that refined it into a signature of Black urban dance. ## The archive's standing The archive holds the moonwalk as a pinnacle of Black kinetic imagination: a simple foot pattern turned, through Black craft, into an impossible image of gliding across the stage. Its path from anonymous street sets and club floors to the most watched performance of the 1980s is a textbook case of Black authorship stripped in the telling and re‑attached to the last man to show it on a global stage. We seat Jackson firmly as the populariser, and the largely unnamed Black dancers and choreographers as the makers whose work made that moment possible. ## Origins in Black tap, jazz, and pantomime Long before the word “moonwalk” existed, Black tap and jazz dancers were already using gliding steps, backslides and illusionary footwork to create the impression of moving without friction. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, John Bubbles and other Black tap masters of the 1930s–40s developed heel‑toe slides and traveling steps that blurred the line between walking and skating, while social dancers in Black ballrooms played with smooth back‑and‑forth glides as part of swing and rhythm and blues sets. In parallel, Black vaudeville and pantomime performers incorporated comic “moving‑but‑not‑moving” walks into their stage acts, borrowing from mime traditions and adding rhythmic complexity. Mid‑century Black variety shows on the so‑called chitlin’ circuit featured dancers and comics who used backward glides to set up jokes or magic‑like reveals. These practices rarely reached mainstream film or television archives, but survive in oral histories, playbills and family recollections held in Black theater collections. ## Street dance refinement: popping, boogaloo and the backslide In the late 1960s and 1970s, Black and Brown youth on the West Coast, especially in Los Angeles and Oakland, built new street styles—popping, boogaloo, and robot—that relied on sharp isolations and illusion-based movement. Within this ecosystem, dancers began formalising a smooth backward glide they sometimes called the “backslide,” styling it with upper‑body freezes and performance flair. Black dancers in crews such as the Electric Boogaloos, and individual stylists like Jeffrey Daniel, shaped the backslide into a featured move, honing the timing, weight shifts and foot placement that made the glide appear frictionless. The move circulated in Black clubs, talent shows, and neighborhood competitions long before cameras arrived, making the social floor—not the television studio—the first lab where the modern moonwalk took form. ## Television appearances before Motown 25 By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Black dancers were beginning to move this street vocabulary onto broadcast stages. Jeffrey Daniel, a Black dancer from Los Angeles, performed the backslide on the British music program “Top of the Pops” in the early 1980s while dancing with Shalamar, introducing European audiences to the illusion. American variety shows and music videos featuring Black performers likewise began to showcase smooth backward glides and related footwork, though credits typically listed only the musical acts, not the street choreographers who supplied the steps. These appearances demonstrate that the core mechanics of the moonwalk were established and circulating among Black dancers before Michael Jackson’s Motown performance. They also show how Black dance innovators often entered the record only as anonymous bodies behind star singers, their authorship assumed to belong to the marquee name. ## Michael Jackson as populariser and renamer On March 25, 1983, during the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special, Michael Jackson performed “Billie Jean” and, at a climactic moment, executed the backward glide that the broadcast and press quickly attached to the name “moonwalk.” Jackson, a Black artist deeply embedded in Black dance traditions, had been observing and learning from street dancers, choreographers and variety‑show performers, including figures like Jeffrey Daniel. Jackson’s performance did not invent the move’s mechanics, but it did fix the name “moonwalk” in the global imagination and tie the illusion to his image. The archive treats this distinction—building versus branding—as central: Jackson authored the moonwalk’s global fame and aesthetic context in pop, while the physical technique, refined by Black street and stage dancers, predates and undergirds that moment. ## Erasure, diffusion and contested credit Mainstream accounts often collapse the moonwalk’s history into a single sentence: “Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk.” That framing erases the Black communities whose experimentation gave the move its power, and treats first global broadcast as first creation. The archive instead presumes authorship lies with the dancers whose labor and ingenuity produced the technique, even when legal and cultural systems failed to recognise their intellectual property. Because many street and club innovators worked informally, without choreographic copyrights, patents or union contracts, official records rarely list them by name. This absence is not evidence that they did not build the move; it is evidence of the structures that routinely denied Black dancers formal credit. The archive therefore names Jackson as the populariser and holds the moonwalk itself as a collective Black creation, with authorship distributed across decades of Black tap, jazz, pantomime and street dance practice. ## Ongoing evolution in Black dance culture After Motown 25, young Black dancers worldwide adopted, remixed and extended the moonwalk, folding it into breaking, popping, Memphis jookin, Chicago footwork and other styles. In Black churches, school talent shows and HBCU campuses, the moonwalk became a rite of passage, a challenge move that signaled technical skill and belonging. This continued innovation underscores the archive’s standing: the moonwalk is not a frozen museum piece attached to a single celebrity, but a living thread in Black dance history. Each generation of Black dancers adds new variations—side moonwalks, circular glides, heel‑toe hybrids—proving that the move’s true home is the community that keeps reinventing it, not the brief moment when it was first named for the Moon on television. ## Sources 1. Michael Jackson, performance of "Billie Jean" on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, NBC television special, 1983 (broadcast footage held in network archives and media collections). 2. Jeffrey Daniel, interview discussing the backslide and early performances with Shalamar on "Top of the Pops," in: Craig S. Smith, "Street Dance Pioneers and the Making of the Moonwalk," Journal of Popular Dance Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2014. 3. Jacqui Malone, "Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance," University of Illinois Press, 1996. 4. Marshall and Jean Stearns, "Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance," Macmillan, 1968. 5. Oral history interviews with West Coast street dancers, 1970s–1980s, in the Hip Hop Dance Oral History Project, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/popping-dance-style - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/motown-25-yesterday-today-forever - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/street-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/tap-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/michael-jackson --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Moonwalk (dance move)," revised July 22, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/moonwalk-dance-move-89e4 Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.