CMT Alan Jackson Tribute Taping
There was a party here in Nashville in mid-August marking Alan Jackson’s 50th birthday, and also his reaching the major milestone of 50 million albums sold. Granted that when it comes to discussions of even relatively contemporary country music, some seem content to reverse the old Elvis Presley hits package title and presume 50 million fans must be wrong. But there is simply no denying that Jackson has elicited tremendous response from country fans, for good reasons, and he has done so as a sometimes surprisingly feisty advocate for traditional country music updated for contemporary listeners. Not to mention that he wrote or co-wrote 33 of his sonically and conceptually varied #1 country singles.
That’s more than worthy of note, and Country Music Television is noting it with a 90-minute special set to air December 6. It’s the third in the network’s nicely designed annual “Giants” series, which features artists who especially want to salute the honoree by performing the subject’s songs for him or her. With Alan Jackson the focus (as Reba McEntire and Hank Williams Jr. were previously), the performers turn out to be contemporary country stars who demonstrably share his taste for modernized traditionalism and strong songs.
“I believe this is the first time I’ve sat out in a crowd and watched my band play!” Jackson noted when he took the stage near the show’s end. He and that longtime band of his, the Strayhorns, offered a sensitive “Remember When” and crisp, clap-along “Chattahoochee” before Jackson was joined by George Strait, Brad Paisley and Dierks Bentley for a chugging turn on Jackson’s recent hit “Country Boy”. The ever-so-slightly menacing ditty isn’t exactly the most profound song he’s ever offered, but it received some fresh life and audience-pleasing camaraderie in that one-time-only set of hands, as Jackson and Strait traded vocal verses and Paisley provided electric guitar leads.
Some numbers leading up to that finale tended and were no doubt intended by the artists to show Jackson’s influence on their performing. Paisley’s vocals on the opener, “Five O’Clock Somewhere”, channeled Jackson’s when hitting the low notes and then Jackson joined him to finish that one off. Bentley rocked “Don’t Rock The Jukebox”, even as it asks you not to a joke in Jackson’s original, too. Martina McBride, who’d shown on her 2005 release Timeless that her turn on country oldies will often recycle original arrangements and phrasing, did the same for Jackson’s “When Somebody Loves You”. Taylor Swift, in taking up “Drive,” one of Jackson’s best songs, brought her airy, younger-generation stylization to it throughout, and a “daughter in the story” perspective.
The musical highlights for me and I think you’ll agree when you see the show included a fresh duet version of “Gone Country” by those two feisty Texans, Lee Ann Womack and Miranda Lambert, in which they just pinned the “Here it comes!” chorus shouts; and, yep, George Strait’s quiet take on “Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?” As someone who witnessed the World Trade Center attack from Hoboken, just across the river, with my own eyes, from that little town which lost so many specific, actual, very tangible people in the tragedy, the latter song had never quite moved me as much as it has many people, for its focus is (fairly enough) on the reactions of Americans everywhere else. But Strait has always been a particularly emotion-evoking singer, and his rendering of the familiar story and the list of questions in the song stuck me as the best, most riveting, and etched that I’ve heard.
Time has passed, and it’s an open question whether Jackson would still note an inability to tell Iraq from Iran. But there’s no question that he’s been offered a fitting tribute to a long and worthy career.