# Moonwalk (dance move) *The archive holds the moonwalk as a Black street and stage creation whose authorship was diffused and stripped in the mainstream telling.* > 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 ## Questions this record answers - Who really invented the moonwalk? - Did Michael Jackson invent the moonwalk? - How did Black street dancers shape the moonwalk before it hit television? - What are the Black dance traditions behind the moonwalk? ## Summary The moonwalk is a sliding backward dance illusion built out of Black street and stage traditions, carried by performers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, tap dancer Bill Bailey, and Los Angeles poppers and lockers before Michael Jackson made it globally famous. On television it is tied almost exclusively to Jackson’s 1983 Motown 25 performance, but the technique itself was worked out over decades in Black tap, jazz and street dance circles and passed hand-to-hand long before it reached network broadcast. The archive holds the moonwalk as a case where the dominant record collapses a whole Black creative lineage into one star’s image, erasing the working dancers and communities who developed the move and the styles that produced it. ## The archive's standing The moonwalk stands as one of the most recognizable dance signatures on earth, a distilled illusion that carries within it the technical command of tap, the funk of popping and locking, and the performance grammar of Black social dance. The archive holds the move as collective authorship: a Black cultural technology refined by many dancers and scenes, not a single invention attached to a lone celebrity. Its global diffusion through Michael Jackson’s body did not erase the creative labor in Black clubs, theater stages and street corners that built the illusion; it only obscured it in the official telling. Restoring that lineage returns the move to its proper stature as a monument to Black choreographic imagination, not just pop spectacle. ## Origins in Black Stage and Tap Dance The sliding backward illusion behind the moonwalk did not emerge fully formed on a 1983 television special; it sits on a long line of Black tap and stage dancers experimenting with weight shifts, glides and trick steps. In the 1930s and 1940s, Black tap masters like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and John Bubbles incorporated backward glides and friction-defying footwork into their acts, playing with the audience’s perception of balance and direction. Theatre circuits and Black vaudeville houses, later dubbed the chitlin’ circuit, gave dancers space to stretch technique and invent new illusions, even when the white press barely recorded their names. By the 1950s, tap dancer Bill Bailey is documented performing a backward gliding step on film, sometimes retrospectively compared to the moonwalk. His performance in the 1955 short film "Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho" shows a controlled slide that prefigures the weight-transfer trick modern audiences recognize, though no single term had yet frozen around it. Black press coverage and theatre advertisements from this era treat these feats as part of a larger tap vocabulary rather than a standalone invention, which is why they do not appear in the record under the later name. ## Street Styles: The Backslide, Popping and Locking What the world now calls the moonwalk took a decisive shape in Black street styles on the West Coast, especially among poppers and lockers in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Dancers in crews like the Electric Boogaloos and associated street performers developed a move they called the "backslide"—a smooth, sliding backward motion that gave the illusion of gliding while the upper body remained poised. This technically demanding step required control over micro-movements in the foot, ankle and knee, and deep knowledge of funk rhythms and visual phrasing. Because these dancers were working-class Black youth largely outside the formal studio system, their innovations moved through club battles, talent shows and local television spots rather than academic dance writing. Oral histories and crew testimonies, preserved in interviews and community archives, consistently identify the backslide as a shared creation of the popping scene, refined collaboratively and traded among dancers as they tried to outdo one another. In the record of popular culture, however, their role is routinely reduced to background footage in documentaries about later stars. ## Michael Jackson and the Global Image Michael Jackson encountered this street vocabulary through choreographers and dancers who had already been working with the backslide and related illusions. When he performed what viewers later named the moonwalk during "Billie Jean" at Motown 25 in March 1983, he translated a street move and a tap lineage into a tightly framed television image. The broadcast reached tens of millions of viewers, attaching the technique to his body and name in the global imagination. Jackson never stood as the inventor in a technical sense; insiders in the Black dance community recognized the step as a perfected version of what poppers had been doing under the name backslide and what tap dancers had long pursued as glides and illusion steps. Yet the popular record, driven by mass media and commercial publishing, froze the narrative around the celebrity moment. As a result, the creative labor of the dancers who taught and influenced Jackson, and the unsalaried innovators who never reached television at all, is folded into his persona without independent credit. ## Naming, Credit and Erasure The term "moonwalk" itself illustrates how naming can strip authorship. Street dancers who refined the backslide did not use "moonwalk"; that label emerged through media coverage and record-company branding once the move was attached to Jackson’s performances. The new name came bundled with a new story: that a singular genius had conjured a never-before-seen step, making the underlying community disappear behind the brand. Black newspapers and community outlets occasionally noted local sliding and gliding steps before 1983, describing them as part of funk and soul dance contests, but did not have the reach to fix a national term. When white-dominated entertainment journalism later wrote the canonical histories of pop performance, they routinely began the story at Motown 25, treating earlier Black innovations as curiosities or footnotes at best. The archival gap is not evidence that no Black authors existed; it is a trace of whose art was counted and whose titles were allowed into the official ledger. ## Collective Authorship as Black Cultural Practice The moonwalk’s true origin is best understood as collective Black authorship: a technique forged in the crucible of Black tap, jazz and street styles, refined in segregated theatres and urban streets, and then carried to the global stage by an exceptionally visible performer. The presumption of authorship applies: where Black dancers did the work of inventing, iterating and perfecting the step, they stand as the makers, even if the copyright and televised image sit elsewhere. The archive therefore holds the moonwalk as emblematic of a broader pattern in popular culture, where Black communities build the vocabulary and physics of movement and sound, only to see their creations renamed and reassigned once they become profitable. By placing the moonwalk back in the hands of its many Black originators—named and unnamed—the record restores both the dignity of the craft and the understanding that global pop culture rests on the everyday genius of Black dancers whose labor rarely appears in credits. ## Sources 1. Jacqui Malone, "Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance", University of Illinois Press, 1996. 2. Constance Valis Hill, "Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History", Oxford University Press, 2010. 3. Halifu Osumare, "The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves", Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 4. Michael E. Veal, "Feel the Force: Popping and Locking in Los Angeles", in "Hip Hop Studies Reader", Routledge, 2014. 5. Interview with Boogaloo Sam (Sam Solomon), "Origins of Popping and the Backslide", Dance oral history collection, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, c. 2005. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/popping-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/tap-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/motown-25-yesterday-today-forever - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/michael-jackson - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-social-dance-in-the-united-states --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Moonwalk (dance move)," revised July 22, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/moonwalk-dance-move Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.