By Madoline Markham Koonce
Murphy Wright had no idea where his dance moves would take him when he and his friends performed a dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the Edgewood Elementary School talent show back in 2011 – or that an app called TikTok would even exist.
Fast forward to 2024, and the 2018 Homewood High School graduate has danced his way to nearly 830,000 followers on TikTok. The video pinned at the top of his @murphymwright profile, filmed on the front porch of his house in Edgewood, has 20.5 million views. But it’s not just about numbers for Murphy.
“I love doing what I am doing, creating content and making these cool dances, putting it out there and seeing what happens,” he said.
Murphy’s most-watched video to date, posted in May 2022, amassed 2 million likes, and he was getting tagged right and left by other TikTok users posting videos of the dance at the time.
“I wanted to watch every single one of them, and I liked and commented on every one,” he said.
Also of note, JoJo Siwa, a popular singer, dancer and YouTube star, posted videos of Murphy’s viral dance twice. She didn’t tag Murphy, but his friends saw it and were sure to let him know.
Dancing Since Childhood
Murphy’s passion for dancing started young. “As soon as I was walking, I was dancing,” he recalled.
He was in the show choir at Homewood Middle and High School, and after high school he started taking hip-hop classes and later ballet, jazz and contemporary dance at Linda Dobbins Dance in Mountain Brook as well as performing solos in dance competitions with the studio.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, dance classes moved to Zoom and Murphy got curious about an app called TikTok his friends had been using to make and post videos. He was skeptical at first but decided to give it a try, learning trending dances and posting videos that lasted about 15 seconds each.
A month later, he decided to try choreographing a dance himself and posting it. Before he knew it, that video had more than 100,000 views and more than 10,000 likes.
“That felt pretty good,” he recalled. “I want to keep going.”
And keep going he did. By the time people were starting to get the COVID vaccine a year later, he hit a milestone of 10,000 followers after a video blew up with more than 500,000 views. At that point, he was able to sign up for a creator fund on TikTok and earn 1 cent for every 1,000 views his videos got until that program ended in May 2023.
From there, Murphy started posting one dance video a day, some original and some with dances that already had been trending. He estimates that it only takes him 10 to 15 minutes to learn a new dance from the app. By that summer, he’d reached 50,0000 followers; by October, he’d reached 100,000; and by the end of 2022, he’d reached 500,000. The numbers kept climbing, too.
“I gotta keep going,” Murphy remembers thinking. “It felt really good,” he said. “I never thought there’d be a platform where I could show my talent for dancing.”
After Murphy turned 21, he ran into a friend from elementary school who’d become a DJ at Zydeco, a bar and music venue near Five Points, and before long he had teamed up with DJ Ryan Respinto as the “hype man” for his DJ jobs at bars and UAB formals. Around that time, people started recognizing him in public from TikTok, too.
In early 2023, Taco Bell reached out to Murphy and asked him to submit a 15-second dance video to promote their Mexican pizza, and his submission ran in a grid of dance videos as a part of their campaign. Asics has also reached out to him and sent him shoes and merchandise to wear in his videos.
Kelly Roth, Murphy’s neighbor who was also his ninth-grade biology teacher, often sees him filming TikToks outside when she walks her dog past his house.
“I just love it,” she said. “I always tell him to keep dancing. He’s such a fun, spirited, happy human, and he brings a smile to your face.”
Her son Thatcher, who is 10, and other neighbor kids are also in awe of Murphy’s dance moves, she said, and Thatcher and two other boys danced in the background of a video Murphy filmed on their street and posted in June 2023. Today it has 163,700 views.
“They thought it was so neat,” she said. “Thatcher was excited to see it.”
Murphy’s mother, Amy – whom he calls his number one supporter – said she’s enjoyed seeing what a delight this journey has been for him and the self confidence and community he has gained through it.
“I think more than anything it’s been a positive thing,” she said. “We all think of the internet as being an evil and dark place, but 99 percent of the comments Murphy has gotten have been super positive and you watch videos of little kids doing his dances.”
Still at It
Today Murphy continues to film videos daily after spending his days working in the patient transportation department at UAB Hospital.
He’s hoping to get up to 1 million followers on TikTok by the end of 2024, although he found his follower count plateaued at the end of last summer, like many other people he knows on TikTok. Still, he is always studying his account’s analytics to determine the best time to post videos, experimenting with hashtags and keeping his eye on new trends.
This year Murphy also wants to travel to Los Angeles and New Zealand to meet and collaborate with other TikTok dancers he has become friends with through the app. As he has learned, you never know what might happen in the TikTok world.
“Anything is possible,” he said. “You keep putting things out there, and it can just blow up. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s very rewarding.”
