🎶 4 Underrated Alan Jackson Tracks You’ve Probably Missed (But Definitely Need to Hear) 🎶
1. “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore”
Alan Jackson writes most of his songs, but he didn’t write this one. Instead, Jay Knowles and Jackson’s nephew, Adam Wright, wrote this, for his 2012 Thirty Miles West record.
The heart-wrenching song is about a man who offers to be the bad guy when a relationship ends, if only to make his former girlfriend feel better.
“When you and our friends talk, Make it all my fault,” Jackson sings. “Tell ’em I’m rotten to the core, I’ll let it all slide / Get ’em all on your side, So you don’t have to love me anymore.”
“Well, at first it raised the hair on my arms, when I heard the demo,” Jackson tells The Boot. “It was a really good version, too. It was one of those songs that, when I heard it, it’s the kind of song that made me want to be in country music. I’m such a big fan of that kind of song. Sad songs, or break-up songs, and heartache songs are always the best ones to bring that emotion out and are actually the easiest to write as a writer.”
2. “A House With No Curtains”
Like “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,” “A House With No Curtains” also barely cracked the Top 20. Jackson wrote the song with Jim McBride, released in 1998 from Jackson’s Everything I Love record.
The song practically drips with pure country music heartache, with lines like, “It’s like living in a house with no curtains / The whole world can see what’s inside / You can turn out the lights / In a house with no curtains / But heartache has nowhere to hide.”
Jackson felt the song was still important enough to later include on his three-disc set, Genuine: The Alan Jackson Story, out in 2015.
3. “Blue Blooded Woman”
“Blue Blooded Woman” is Jackson’s first-ever single. Released in 1989, Jackson penned the song with Roger Murrah and Keith Stegall, for his freshman Here in the Real World. The song is about a man and woman who are complete opposites, yet somehow it works.
“She’s Saks Fifth Avenue perfection,” Jackson sings. “Caviar and dignified / Well, I live my life in Walmart fashion / And I like my sushi Southern fried.”
Jackson hoped “Blue Blooded Woman” would do much better than it did, and not just for his own career. As the single was tanking at radio, Jackson’s wife Denise revealed she was unexpectedly pregnant with the couple’s first child.
“We weren’t really planning that,” Jackson tells The Tennessean. “I thought if I put out another single that died, they’d probably drop me from the label and I’d be going back to work to pay for this baby.”
4. “Sissy’s Song”
“Sissy’s Song” cracked the Top 10 in 2009, but it’s not one fans talk about much, at least not compared to his other hits. But the song deserves a repeat listen, if only because of the sentimental story behind the song.
“Why did she have to go,” Jackson questions in the song. “So young I just don’t know why / Things happen half the time / Without reason, without rhyme / Lovely, sweet young woman / Daughter, wife and mother / Makes no sense to me.”
Jackson penned the song by himself, about his longtime friend and employee, Leslie “Sissy” Fitzgerald, who was killed in a motorcycle accident.
“I wrote it for a girl that worked for us who died,” Alan Jackson tells The Boot. “She was a lady that looked after the whole house. Leslie Fitzgerald was her real name, but we called her Sissy. She had an accident on a motorcycle; she was 40-something [when she died on May 20, 2007]. She was just somebody who was in our house every day … then, all of a sudden, [she was] gone. When people get old, you expect them to die, but it’s different when they are young, and it’s tragic like that.”
“It’s a real special song for me,” he continues. “I recorded it for the funeral, but Keith [Stegall] and I went into the studio one day and put the guitar and vocal down. It’s just me and the guitar and the harmony parts. After some people heard it at the label, everybody wanted to put it on the album.”