She Began To Cry In Her Own Kitchen Before Christmas Morning Truly Began
Shortly before Christmas Alan Jackson carried a homemade CD into the Georgia kitchen of his mother and asked Mama Ruth to listen before the family began opening presents
She had no idea her son had quietly recorded an entire album for her
When Blessed Assurance began to play the tears came and Alan later remembered them continuing through one cherished hymn after another
She had asked for these songs but she had never known he was actually recording them
For years Ruth had wanted Alan to sing the old gospel hymns she loved and many were songs he had grown up hearing in a Baptist church
Eventually he and his wife Denise took an old hymnal to their river house and sat by the hearth turning the pages and choosing music their mothers would recognize almost by instinct
A Family Gift Was Never Meant To Become A Commercial Record
Working with longtime producer Keith Stegall Jackson kept the arrangements deliberately spare and allowed acoustic instruments and familiar melodies to carry songs such as Blessed Assurance and The Old Rugged Cross and How Great Thou Art
Only a small number of CDs were initially made for relatives and close friends and the project might have remained a private family treasure
People around Jackson kept hearing something in the recordings that reached beyond the family and he was eventually persuaded to release them commercially in 2006
The Quiet Album Traveled Farther Than Anyone Expected
Precious Memories debuted atop the Billboard country and Christian and Gospel album charts and eventually sold well over a million copies despite being built without the machinery of a conventional hit driven Nashville album
Its reception was strong enough that Jackson returned to the hymns left unused the first time and released Precious Memories Volume II in 2013
The million selling album came later while first there was only a kitchen and a CD made for Mama Ruth
By then Alan Jackson had spent decades making records designed to travel through radio into millions of homes yet this one traveled in the opposite direction because it began inside his own family with songs older than his career
And in that quiet Georgia kitchen he watched his mother recognize every song and understood that the gift had already reached exactly where it was meant to go