Alan Jackson’s mother had long hoped he would record an album of hymns. She had held that wish for a decade. After a family funeral, the rest of the family joined her. What started as a private Christmas gift became Precious Memories, a 2006 gospel record that went Platinum without a single radio single.
The push became urgent when Jackson’s father-in-law died. Jackson recorded “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” for the funeral. Once that song existed, other family members began urging him to finish the project his mother had been asking for. He and his wife, Denise, went through an old Baptist hymnal they kept at home. They chose the hymns they remembered singing growing up in Newnan, Georgia, narrowed a list of about 30 songs down to 15, and set out to record them the way they had heard them in church.
Simple on purpose
Jackson was clear about the goal. He wanted the songs to evoke the same emotions they felt when they sang them on Sundays. He did not dig for obscure hymns, and he did not jazz the standards up or give them a blues spin. “I wanted to make them feel like they did when we sang them in church,” he said. The arrangements stayed spare: piano, acoustic guitar, organ, and harmony voices. Keith Stegall produced. Brent Mason played acoustic guitar. Gary Prim handled piano and organ. John Wesley Ryles and Melodie Crittenden added backing vocals.
Denise and their daughters, including Ali and Mattie, sang on one track, “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” Jackson took the cover photograph himself. It showed a simple country-style church. The whole package looked and sounded like the gift it was meant to be, not like a commercial country album dressed in gospel clothes.
One hundred copies, then the rest of the country
At first, the album was intended as a limited-edition Christmas gift for his mother. Jackson had about 100 CDs made for family and friends. He never planned for a wider audience. RCA Label Group chairman Joe Galante heard the recordings, liked them, and encouraged a commercial release, along with the family and friends who had already been pushing. Arista Nashville put Precious Memories in stores on February 28, 2006.
The track list reads like a Sunday service in Newnan: “Blessed Assurance,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “I Love to Tell the Story,” “In the Garden,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “How Great Thou Art,” and the funeral song that started the project, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” runs just over a minute. Nothing on the record was built for radio.
Platinum without a single
Once it reached fans, the album achieved Platinum certification from the RIAA, even though no singles were released from it. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, Jackson’s eighth country No. 1, and at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. It also topped the Christian album charts. He performed the full set at the Ryman Auditorium, the former gospel tabernacle, with a small band and harmony singers, and the wooden pews filled with people singing along.
A second volume, Precious Memories Volume II, followed in 2013. The first one remains the clearer story. A mother in Newnan asked for hymns for ten years. A funeral made the request impossible to postpone. A husband and wife picked the songs they already knew, kept them plain, and pressed 100 copies as a Christmas gift. The label heard what the family had already heard, and a private record became a Platinum one without ever needing a hit single. For Jackson, it was the album that sounded like the church he grew up in. For his mother, it was the wish she had held for a decade, finally on a disc.
