You Can Take The Wheel Now
That quiet permission lives at the heart of the song Alan Jackson finally wrote for his father and it arrived only after he stopped trying to force grief into a farewell
You can take the wheel now
After Gene Jackson died in January 2000 Alan tried to write something for him yet the songs kept turning into the kind of mournful goodbye he did not want
So he stopped writing about death and began remembering what his father had actually given him
What surfaced was an old plywood boat on a lake near the Alabama line and a young boy trusted to steer while his father sat beside him
Gene Jackson was a quiet man who spent much of his life working with his hands and Alan later said one of the clearest gifts his father passed down was a love of cars and machines
There was also an old Ford pickup the two worked on together before driving the dirt roads around their Georgia home and none of those ordinary afternoons seemed monumental while they were happening
Years later those were the memories that remained and they became Drive For Daddy Gene
Grief Stayed Behind The Song Instead Of Taking Center Stage
Jackson deliberately avoided explaining the loss too plainly because he had long preferred to take something intensely personal and leave enough room for listeners to recognize their own lives inside it
With Drive the death of his father sits behind the music while the boats and trucks and dirt roads do the emotional work instead
Released in January 2002 the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart
One Generation Hands Confidence To The Next
The most revealing turn comes near the end when the boy once trusted with the wheel is now a father himself sitting beside his daughters as they learn to drive
That detail changes the song from a simple remembrance of Gene Jackson into a portrait of how something almost invisible passes through a family as a father gives a child confidence and the child grows older and one day repeats the gesture without realizing how much time has passed
Jackson once described his father as such a quiet man that only with age did he fully understand how rare his character had been
Gene Jackson had already left his son something more durable than a grand goodbye
He left the memory of sitting close beside his boy and saying in the simplest possible way that he believed in him and that memory kept moving forward every time Alan took his place beside his own daughters