Updated October 19, 2026.
The best recent glimpse of Rebbie Jackson came from her son, and it involved a board game. Asked by CNN in May 2025 what made him happy besides music, Austin Brown named game nights with his grandmother Katherine Jackson, then 95, and added: “Especially when it’s me, her, and my mom playing. I cherish those moments big time.” The mom is Rebbie, the eldest of the ten Jackson children, who turned 76 this year and moved out of the family house in Gary at 18 to get married.
How old is Rebbie Jackson?
Maureen Reillette Jackson was born on May 29, 1950, in Gary, Indiana, which makes her 76. The family house was at 2300 Jackson Street, an address her brothers later turned into the title of a 1989 single (she sings on it). She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary in 1968, the same year she married.
The eldest of ten siblings
Her siblings, in order, are Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Brandon (who died shortly after birth in 1957), Michael, Randy and Janet. Michael died in June 2009, and Tito died in September 2024. Entertainment Tonight’s report on Tito’s death listed Rebbie among the seven surviving siblings.
Her own description of the job, given to the New York Post in 2010, sounds like something from a school principal: “I’m very much the big sister. I helped raise a lot of them. I took care of them and administered the disciplinary action.” The paper’s account of those years has her in charge of the younger children as a teenager, while Katherine enrolled in school and Joe worked. By the time she married and left home in 1968, her younger brothers were already performing as the Jackson 5.
Like her mother, she became a Jehovah’s Witness, and biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli counts her, La Toya and Michael as the most devout of the children. The faith goes a long way toward explaining why, by Jackson standards, her public life has stayed so small.
Rebbie Jackson’s husband, Nathaniel Brown
She married Nathaniel Brown, her childhood sweetheart, in 1968, at 18. Joe Jackson opposed the marriage, and Katherine backed her daughter. They stayed married for 44 years, until Brown died of cancer on January 6, 2013.
Brown has his own credit in her discography: he co-wrote “Come Alive Saturday Night” with Randy and Tito for her first album, and his son later credited him with the work ethic that keeps an independent career going: “I saw that example every day,” Austin told CNN, describing his father running his own business. When Brown died, it was Austin who spoke for the family on Twitter, thanking fans for “the amazing love you have been giving me and my family.” Rebbie herself made no public statement.
Rebbie Jackson’s children: Stacee, Yashi and Austin
The couple had three children, all of them performers. Stacee Brown was born in 1971 and is married to songwriter and producer Rex Salas. Yashi Brown was born in 1977. Stacee and Yashi formed a vocal group first called X-Girls, later Geneva. Stacee’s daughter, London Blue, born in 2005, made Rebbie a grandmother.
Yashi has become the family’s most public voice on a subject the Jacksons rarely discuss. She calls herself a spoken word artist and mental health advocate and says she is “thriving with bipolar type I.” She published a poetry book, Black Daisy in a White Limousine, and spoke at the 2013 National Dialogue on Mental Illness launched by the Obama White House. Rebbie’s part was quieter, and to me the more touching one: in 2011 she put her own name at the top of the Pick Up the Phone tour, which opened in Washington, D.C., and was tied to suicide prevention. She told Fox News that the years before her daughter’s diagnosis were “such a hard thing” and that getting through came down to “staying focused and prayer.” In 2016 mother and daughters received a special recognition award at SAMHSA’s Voice Awards.
Austin, born in 1985 in Tarzana, California, is the musician of the three. He rapped on the 1998 remix of his mother’s “Centipede,” signed with Interscope as a young man, wrote and produced for other artists, and now releases music independently with his band BLVK CVSTLE (their album is The Festival). Asked about the business, he gave CNN the same word four times over: “tough, tough, tough, tough.”
Rebbie Jackson’s songs: “Centipede” and after
She began performing with her siblings at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 1974 and appeared on the CBS variety series The Jacksons in 1976 and 1977. Columbia signed her as a solo artist in 1982, and her debut album, Centipede, came out in October 1984. Michael wrote, arranged and produced the title track and sang backing vocals with the Weather Girls. “Centipede” reached No. 4 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 24 on the Hot 100 and went gold.
The song has a slinky, slightly sinister synth line, and it suits her low, warm voice better than anything else she recorded. Two more Columbia albums followed, Reaction (1986) and R U Tuff Enuff (1988), with “Plaything” reaching No. 8 on the R&B chart. Then she stepped back for a decade, returning with a cover of “Forever Young” for Free Willy 2 in 1995 and a final album, Yours Faithfully, on Michael’s MJJ Productions imprint at Epic in 1998. He wrote and produced “Fly Away” for it.
Her catalog is short, four albums in fourteen years, and “Centipede” carries most of it. It also sounds better now than a lot of its 1984 chart neighbors, which is not a small thing to say about a song with a centipede in it.
Michael, and the years since
At Michael’s memorial at the Staples Center in July 2009, the siblings sang together, and afterward Rebbie, Janet and La Toya spoke to fans at L.A. Live. The following spring she told the New York Post that “for a while, it was very difficult to listen to anything that Michael’s voice was on,” and that “when he passed, I thought about him the way he was as a kid.” On The View in January 2011 she said: “A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about it, think about him.”
In the years since, she has mostly kept to private life. She attended her father’s private funeral in July 2018. This year the Michael biopic, which casts her nephew Jaafar Jackson as her brother, put the family back in the headlines. Austin had already seen a screen test by May 2025 and called it “emotional.”
My take
People tend to file Rebbie as the Jackson who sat it out, which skips the part where she helped raise her brothers before they were the Jackson 5, and the part where Michael wrote and produced her one gold record. After Yours Faithfully in 1998 she let the career go quiet and put her energy into a 44-year marriage to Nathaniel Brown and three children who all ended up on stage. When Austin says his mother keeps “a good, balanced head on her shoulders,” I take him at his word, since he is the one at the game table with her and Katherine.
Sources
- CNN via KVIA: Austin Brown, son of Rebbie Jackson, is deep in the family business of music, May 31, 2025
- Wikipedia: Rebbie Jackson (birth date, discography, chart positions)
- Biography.com: Rebbie Jackson (marriage, children, grandchild)
- Black America Web: Rebbie Jackson’s husband dies, Jan 8, 2013
- MJWN quoting the New York Post: Rebbie speaks of Michael, Apr 19, 2010
- MJWN: Rebbie Jackson on The View, Jan 27, 2011
- Fox News: Rebbie Jackson on raising a daughter with bipolar disorder, Feb 21, 2011
- APB Speakers: Yashi Brown official speaker bio
- Wikipedia: Austin Brown
- Hello!: Meet the 10 Jackson siblings, updated Apr 11, 2026
- HeyUGuys: Tito and Rebbie Jackson interview, Nov 2011
