In 2005, Alan Jackson was one of the biggest-selling artists in country music. That Christmas, he made a record that was not headed for radio or record stores. It was a stack of 100 homemade CDs of old church hymns, and the first person they were meant for was his mother, Ruth.
Ten years of asking
Ruth Musick Jackson, known to the family and later to fans as Mama Ruth, raised five children in Newnan, Georgia, in a small house built around an old tool shed. Alan was the youngest and the only boy.
By the mid-2000s, his mother had been after him for roughly ten years to make a gospel record.
A funeral and an old hymnal
What finally moved him was a loss in the family. In 2005, Denise Jackson’s father died, and Alan recorded “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” to be played at the funeral. After that, his mother was no longer the only one asking. The whole family wanted more.
So Alan and Denise, who had sung together in a church choir back in Georgia, pulled out an old Baptist hymnal they kept in the house. They went through it, marking the songs they remembered best from the pews of their childhood. The list started at about 30. They cut it to 15.
Jackson later admitted that as they sat singing through the book, he realized how long it had been since he had sung some of those songs. He still knew the choruses. The verses took some work.
The way they sounded on Sunday morning
He could have dressed the songs up. He did the opposite. With his longtime producer Keith Stegall, he kept the arrangements close to what a small church would have used: acoustic guitars, a piano, an organ and a couple of harmony singers. No orchestra, no gospel choir, no modern updates.
“Make them feel like they did when we sang them in church.”
That was his goal, as he described it to the Associated Press. The fifteen songs could have come straight off a small-town Sunday program: “Blessed Assurance,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “In the Garden,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art.”
The only guests were family. Denise and their daughters sang backup on “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” And the photograph of the small country church on the cover was one Alan took himself.
One hundred CDs
When the recordings were finished, Jackson had 100 CDs made up as Christmas gifts. His mother got hers, and a small number went to relatives and close friends. As he told it, nobody beyond that circle was ever supposed to hear them.
Denise thought otherwise. Jackson later recalled her telling him that if he sang the old hymns the way people remembered them from church, people would buy that record. He went along with her, but he insisted the project had been an honest effort to do something sweet for their mothers, not a plan to sell albums.
From a family gift to the charts
Family and friends who heard the CDs kept urging him to share them. Then the recordings reached Joe Galante, chairman of the RCA Label Group, which included Jackson’s label, Arista Nashville, and he liked how intimate they sounded.
“Precious Memories” reached stores on February 28, 2006. The night before, Jackson sang the album at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the old gospel tabernacle that later became the Mother Church of Country Music, with fans singing along from the wooden pews.
Without a single radio hit, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and No. 4 on the all-genre Billboard 200. By August it was certified platinum, and the following year it won the Dove Award for Country Album of the Year.
A chapel on Music Row
On August 29, 2006, Jackson celebrated the platinum certification in the chapel of the Sony BMG building on Music Row. He gathered the women in his life: Denise, their three daughters, Denise’s mother, Nell, and his own mother, Ruth. Then he handed out the plaques himself.
The gift had come all the way around. The woman who asked for the record for a decade was in the room when it was honored.
The song at the end of the album
The album closes with “I Want to Stroll Over Heaven with You,” a newer gospel song by Dale Dodson rather than an old hymnal standard. When Jackson performed the album at the Ryman for a filmed concert, cameras caught Mama Ruth and Denise’s mother in the audience, holding on to each other while he sang it. His mother later said it was a song she and her husband, Gene, had first heard together at a gospel singing years before, and that it stayed special to her after he was gone.
One small oddity fans still mention: an album called “Precious Memories” did not include the hymn “Precious Memories.” Jackson finally recorded it for “Precious Memories Volume II” in 2013, which he said he made partly because his mother and Denise’s mother were getting older.
Where it began
Ruth Jackson died on January 7, 2017, at her home in Newnan, the same house where she had lived for 70 years. She was 86. Some reports published after her death described the album as a Mother’s Day present, but Jackson’s own accounts in 2006 and his later press materials call it what it was at the start: a Christmas gift for his mother, recorded by a son who finally said yes.