Alan Jackson

A bigger star than ever -- thanks to his 9/11 anthem -- the easygoing entertainer is up for a record 10 CMA Awards this week.

By Alanna Nash

"I was probably depressed about the tragedies, and then I was thinking what I did for a living wasn't worth a lot. The song helped me deal with that."

Ohio may have fought for the North, but the Cincinnati fans treat Alan Jackson -- a guitar-toting Georgia gentleman -- like a native son. The capacity crowd loves the singer's hard-country shuffles about pop-a-top woes and gentle jabs at Nashville's pop-obsessed music industry. But it's the soothing songs about family, hometown pride and childhood rites of passage that draw the biggest hoots and shouts.

Then Jackson, 6 feet 4 inches of loose-limbed, cowboy-booted charm, goes into "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)", his anthem to Sept. 11, 2001, and the crowd is on its feet. The giant arena settles into a hush, pricked only by the click of cigarette lighters lit in appreciation and the sound of Jackson's soft singing. Here and there, men and women wipe away tears.

Jackson, nominated for a record 10 Country Music Association Awards for 2002 (the prestigious trophies will be handed out at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday on CBS), has sold more than 39 million albums since his 1990 debut, "Here in the Real World". The last of Nashville's pure traditionalists, he has won a rabid following for songs that celebrate the modest pleasures of life and for his conversational, yet eloquent, lyrics. More than most of his Nashville contemporaries, Jackson, 44, has held to a consistent level of musical excellence and thematic vision in his 13 years of recording.

However, the No. 1 success of "Where Were You", which captures a myriad of reactions to the terrorist attacks, has elevated Jackson to a new plateau of fame. People who had never before listened to country music bought his 2.5 million-selling "Drive" album and came home to the core values of God, country and family that the genre has typically embraced.

"Alan epitomizes what country is all about," says Ed Benson, executive director of the Country Music Association. "There's always a concurrency of popularity of country music with difficult times, when people look inward and try to find the connections to their pasts and friends and family. That franchise is where our artists reside, and Alan has that unpretentious image of the great cowboy heroes that Americans still admire. In a world of superficiality, he stands as a shining example of the highest qualities a person can [have]."

Such accolades embarrass the famously closed-mouthed star, who says "ma'am," has trouble looking interviewers in the eye and feels overwhelmed by the attention that accompanies his growing fame. "It's crazy the way people perceive me and my music," he says in his Brentwood, Tenn., office, clad in shorts and sneakers, a cap in place of his usual Stetson. "I'm not any different, and I can't say anything more than the song said: 'I'm just a singer of simple songs.' "

It was the image of another tall "singer of simple songs," the great Hank Williams Sr., that inspired Jackson to write and sing. Growing up in Newnan, Ga., the last of five children and the only boy, he saw his professional destiny in a pair of movies about the doomed Alabama entertainer who died at 29 after writing country's most influential catalogue. "I always felt this connection with Hank," Jackson recalls. "The way he grew up reminded me of my life, with Baptist hymns and dirt in your yard instead of grass. I always felt I grew up under similar conditions, with the whole rural Southern kind of family, but I had a lot nicer life."

In 1985 -- already married to his high school sweetheart, Denise -- he moved to Nashville. It took him four years to get a record deal: One label told him he didn't have star quality, and all agreed his midtempo meditations on corn bread and chicken were too hick for Nashville amid the slick, pop-dominated "urban cowboy" wave of the '80s.

"When he opens his mouth, only country music comes out," says his longtime producer, Keith Stegall. "He's outspoken about maintaining the integrity of the art form."

Jackson was working in the mail room at a country music cable channel when Denise, then a flight attendant, spotted Glen Campbell in an airport and approached him for advice for her husband. Campbell steered Jackson to his Nashville office, which eventually led to his becoming Arista Records' first country act.

From the start, his songs revealed a fierce intelligence, often veiled in humor ("I like my sushi Southern fried"). The CMA's Benson calls the 9/11 anthem Dylanesque: "Like any other poet, Alan creates levels of meaning within his songs, whether he understands he is doing that or not."

Jackson dismisses such complex interpretations, annoying his wife. "I get frustrated with him, because he almost enjoys portraying himself as this country boy who just stumbled into his success," Denise says. "People think he's so laid-back, but he has such a keen mind, and those little wheels are just going continuously."

When pressed, he confesses: "My dialect and voice make people think I'm more laid-back than I am. I'm probably a good actor when I look calm, because I've always been anxious going onstage."

Of course, self-deprecation is a time-honored Nashville trait, but Jackson has more grounding influences: his late father, a mechanic with a quiet demeanor and droll sense of humor, and Andy Griffith's beloved Sheriff Andy Taylor, the rube with the steel-trap mind who presided over the fictional town of Mayberry. To Jackson, who sometimes wears a Mayberry shirt, they're almost one and the same. "I like old Andy," he says, a grin crawling across his face. "He always reminded me of my daddy, and even sort of looked like him." Gene Jackson's death two years ago showed his son "how valuable it is to be a decent person," and Jackson dedicated his song "Drive" to his father.

It was partly that sense of decency that propelled Jackson to get out of bed in the middle of the night and sing the first lines of a song about 9/11 into a tape recorder. He finished "Where Were You" the next morning. "God wrote it," he says, paraphrasing his muse Hank Williams. "I just held the pencil."

Long haunted by guilt that his is "not a real job," Jackson found the deaths of the firefighters at the World Trade Center "made it even worse, like, 'What am I doing here, just writing and singing songs?' I was probably clinically depressed about the tragedies, and then I was thinking what I did for a living wasn't worth a whole lot. The song helped me deal with that, made me feel like what I do does make a difference sometimes." He refuses to exploit the song for other purposes. "To me," he explains, "music is more of an entertainment than a medium [for political messages]."

Others see it as more. "Where Were You", with its dignified lullaby cadence, has helped people heal, as Jackson's fan mail reveals. "I've had a hard time dealing with the aftereffects of that day," wrote a man with survivor guilt who worked in the World Trade Center and watched the towers come down from the Staten Island Ferry. "No tribute has meant more to me than your song." A fan who works at the Pentagon thanked Jackson "for the reminder of what the greatest things are in all of our lives."

The singer himself has worked hard to get those priorities straight, after constantly being on the road when the eldest of his three young daughters was a toddler. He and Denise split up for five months when their marriage hit a rough spot in 1998. "The real love was there," he has said. "It just got lost along the way."

Jackson finds no contradiction in being both a family man and a star, even a sex symbol to some fans: "They don't know the real me, do they? It's amusing to me when I go out [onstage] and there's girls down there, some probably young enough to be my daughters, and then I walk back to the bus and put on my pajamas and sit on the sofa. I wouldn't be that attractive to people if I wasn't a celebrity. I'm not really into all of that star stuff."

In fact, he hardly keeps up with the music business anymore, preferring to stay home with his daughters. "I don't know what I'd do with the rest of my life if I didn't have that family," Jackson says. "Being a good husband, a good father, and just living by basic morals, being honest and fair and considerate, well, I've just learned that that's important. That's what matters most of all."

Alanna Nash, who writes frequently on the Nashville scene, is the author of a biography of Col. Tom Parker, due next spring.

"God wrote it," Jackson says of Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning). "I just held the pencil."

Photos by Tony Baker (www.tonybaker.com) for USA WEEKEND