Alan Jackson

Jackson was born in Newnan in 1958 and grew up with four older sisters in a small house built around his grandfather's toolshed. He worked construction and drove a forklift while playing clubs around Georgia, then moved to Nashville at 27 and took a job in the mailroom at The Nashville Network. In 1986 he was plucked from the studio audience of TNN's You Can Be a Star to sing during a break; he chose George Jones's "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and caught the ear of guest judge Keith Stegall, who went on to produce nineteen of his albums. His wife Denise, a flight attendant, met Glen Campbell on a flight and came home with his manager's business card. In 1989 he became the first artist signed to the new Arista Nashville.

"Here in the Real World" reached number three in early 1990, and the hits barely stopped for a decade. "Chattahoochee" arrived in May 1993, written with Jim McBride after McBride walked in with the line "way down yonder on the Chattahoochee." Jackson later called it "a song about having fun, growing up, and coming of age in a small town" and admitted, "We never thought it would be as big as it's become." It became his first Hot 100 entry and won the CMA's Single and Song of the Year, and its video is remembered for Jackson water-skiing in red cowboy boots and a red life vest. "Livin' on Love," "Gone Country," and a cover of "Summertime Blues" followed.

He was the traditionalist in a decade that was going pop. In 1999, when the CMA asked George Jones to trim his nominated song "Choices" for time and Jones stayed home in protest, Jackson stopped his own performance of "Pop a Top" halfway through, launched into "Choices" instead, and walked off to a standing ovation; Jones said it "meant more to me than I could ever say." The next year he and George Strait opened the ACM Awards with "Murder on Music Row," a complaint about the state of the genre, and Rolling Stone wrote that while Garth and Shania had raised the bar with "Kiss-style production and endless costume changes," Jackson was "doing his best to return the bar to a more human level."

His debut of "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" at the 2001 CMA Awards was widely taken as the night's highlight, and the CMA named him Entertainer of the Year in 2002 and 2003. He entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2017 and, slowed by Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, played his final concert on June 27, 2026.