Fans of Alan Jackson will soon be able to hear what the country superstar gave his mother for Christmas.
Jackson’s new CD, “Precious Memories,” which releases to stores Tuesday, is a collection of traditional gospel hymns recorded in spare, intimate fashion. The 15 tracks include such sacred standards as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I’ll Fly Away” and “How Great Thou Art.”
Jackson, 47, originally put the project together to fulfill a long-standing personal request from his mother. “Every year or so my mother would say, `Well, when are you going to make a gospel album? You make Christmas albums. I know you can make a gospel album,’ ” explains Jackson in a recent phone interview. “It was just a matter of finding the time and energy to do it.”
Wanting to surprise his mother with a private recording gift for Christmas, Jackson put the gospel CD together shortly before the holidays. He sat with his wife, Denise, and together they pored over old hymnals, choosing gospel standards they had both sung in church as kids. Jackson paid special attention to songs that were his mother’s favorites. Denise also suggested hymns that she knew her own mother would love.
“I was just doing it for all these women in my life,” Jackson says with a quiet laugh. “And I wanted my girls to hear it too. They don’t really hear those kinds of songs. The church we go to now, they don’t play a lot of the old hymns anymore.”
‘[Alan Jackson] was kind of surprised that the big old record company would decide to put out a gospel record.’–Joe Galante, chairman, RCA Label Group/NashvilleINSIDE TEMPO
DVDs Johnny Cash in four new releases. PAGE 3 ASK AMY Silly nickname for Auntie might convince her to use nephew’s full name.
The family’s involvement didn’t stop there. Jackson’s wife and two of his daughters — Mattie, 15, and Ali, 12 — supplied backing vocals on “‘Tis So Sweet To Trust in Jesus.” Although youngest daughter Dani, 8, was in the studio that day, she was too shy to take the mic.
As for Mattie and Ali, Jackson says it took some initial fatherly persuasion to get the two to participate. But the girls soon found themselves enjoying the experience.
“Oh, gosh, I didn’t think any of ’em were gonna do it,” he recalls. “I had to about force ’em. Even when we were in there, they were saying, `I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna do this.’ And then they finally did, and they thought it was really cool. After they went in there, they wanted to do another one.”
The final track on the release, “I Want to Stroll Over Heaven With You,” held particular significance for Jackson’s mother. “One of my sisters told me I needed to put that on there for her,” Jackson says. “After my daddy died, somebody played that for my mom. She adopted that song, and it [became] her and daddy’s song after he died.”
In every sense, the new release was a completely personal project for Jackson, right down to the photographs that grace the cover and inner sleeve. Jackson took them all himself with a digital camera his daughters had given him.
“I take pictures a little bit,” Jackson says. “So I ran over to this little church down the road one morning and set up my tripod and did these shots. I also took one of an old Bible that was in our living room.”
The Bible photograph inside the jewel case bears the shadow of a cross over it, an image that is indeed particularly evocative given the religious nature of the recordings. Jackson says the shadow was purely coincidental.
“That cross of a shadow was from the windowpanes in the house, the sun was just coming through. I hadn’t been paying attention. After I shot it I saw that cross coming through.”
Jackson finished the recordings quickly, created his own artwork and pressed about a hundred copies for family and friends. At Christmas, during the family gift exchange, Jackson handed his mother the CD jacket and turned the CD on.
“She cried,” Jackson says. “She’s very happy. She listens to it every day.”
Jackson never intended the record to be a commercial release. But that all changed when RCA Label Group/Nashville chairman Joe Galante requested to hear a copy of Jackson’s homemade sacred music project. The label honcho was moved by what he heard.
“I went out and saw Alan, and he was kind of surprised that the big old record company would decide to put out a gospel record,” Galante says. “Of course I’d explained to him that I’d worked with people over the course of my career in country music that had released gospel records. This was something I thought fit Alan perfectly.”
“We didn’t do this because we knew it was a million-selling record, we just did it because we loved it,” Galante continues. “It’s about integrity with him. I’m not sure many people could pull this off in this format. But for Alan, it is part of his makeup. It’s credible and believable, and therefore relatable.”
In earlier decades, it was routine for a mainstream country star to release gospel records in the course of a hit career. But that practice began to wane in the 1970s, and eventually fell out of vogue.
“The old joke used to be that if you were a country artist, you couldn’t die and go to heaven without making at least one gospel record,” says Wade Jessen, director of country charts at Billboard magazine. “And that really was the case for many, many years. But that hasn’t been the norm in modern times.”
If there is an old-time gospel revival at hand, Jackson is the artist to pull it off.
“It’s entirely possible that Alan could actually achieve some new career heights with this record, particularly with the conservative mood of the country and how really involved and interested his fans have continued to be in his work,” Jessen says. “I think the demand for this record will be vigorous.”
Jessen also points to a growing spiritual mood currently in evidence on the country charts. A number of recent hit songs, though not gospel, have spiritual themes, including Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton’s “When I Get Where I’m Going” and Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take the Wheel.”
“I really thought that a couple of years after 9/11 we’d maybe see that stuff not be as prevalent, but we’re in a big cycle of that right now,” Jessen says. “I think the time is right.”
As for Jackson, whose adherence to traditional country roots has long earned him critical respect, “Precious Memories” is another way to keep the old hymns alive and pass them down to a new generation.
“It’s like my mama’s biscuits,” Jackson says. “When she’s gone, if my wife doesn’t learn how to make ’em just like that, they’re gonna be gone. Actually, my wife makes great biscuits. But I’m serious. Both my mother [and my mother-in-law] still put up preserves. I told my wife, `Man, when they’re gone, if we don’t learn how to do that, nobody’s gonna know how to make that anymore.'”
———-
ctc-arts@tribune.com
