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In the early days of the original Jackson 5, squealing teenaged girls would gather at the old Greensboro Record Center on South Elm Street to buy the group’s latest 45 (remember those?) and gleefully agonize  over who should be their favorite member: little Michael or his older, dreamier sibling, Jermaine?

Hard to believe there was ever any question.

But it became clear soon enough that Michael was the special one, with natural abilities that the precocious little boy’s singing and dancing merely hinted at in those days.

Jackson, who suddenly died Thursday at age 50, wasn’t a singer or dancer or songwriter; he was all of those things ... and more — a performer, with singular gifts and a style uniquely his.

We saw him bloom right before our eyes. Jackson appeared six times in the Greensboro Coliseum, the very first when he was 12 years old in 1970, the last in 1979.

“I think people are rightly calling him the black Elvis,” Greensboro resident Parke Puterbaugh, a former editor for the rock music bible, Rolling Stone, said Friday.  As Puterbaugh sees it, the iconic performer’s death is one of the three most significant losses in contemporary music, ranking with those of Presley and John Lennon.

Jackson transformed the musical landscape with his 1982 album “Thriller,” which sold more than 100 million copies.

He almost single-handedly ripped down the walls that had kept most black artists from airplay on MTV.

He elevated the music video to an art form with elaborate choreography and extended narratives.

But for all of his effectiveness in that prefab medium, he was most amazing live and in person, where his voice and his feet never let him down. Whether frozen on his tiptoes or spinning in a blur or gliding across the stage in his signature moonwalk, he poured himself into every concert.

Sadly, Jackson was at his most comfortable on the stage, where he was a study in raw energy. Away from it, he was shy and reclusive. And unpredictable.

There were his multiple plastic surgeries; child molestation charges, for which he was acquitted; his brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, whose father’s own struggles with fame mirrored Jackson’s own.

The weight of celebrity and his own outsized expectations of himself took their tolls. Jackson became almost obsessed with outselling “Thriller,” a goal he never achieved. (Who could?)

But there was never any doubting the magnificent talents of this odd, extraordinary man.

Even in death, Michael Jackson is bigger than life.