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After selling tens of millions of albums in the 1990s, Alan Jackson offered to buy his parents a spacious estate in Georgia, only for Eugene and Ruth Jackson to refuse to leave the modest home built around an old twelve-by-twelve-foot tool shed.
That structure at 101 College Street in Newnan, Georgia, had begun as a small storage shed on land belonging to Ruth Musick Jackson’s father. When Joseph Eugene Jackson, known to everyone as Gene, married Ruth, the young couple moved into the shed with almost nothing to their names.
As their family grew to include four daughters and one son—Cathy, Carol, Diane, Alan, and Connie—Gene expanded the house one room at a time. Working days as a mechanic servicing postal vehicles and local cars, he came home with engine grease stained into his knuckles and spent his evenings sawing lumber to frame new walls around the original shed.
Even with the additions, space inside the house remained tight for seven people. While his sisters shared the bedrooms, young Alan slept on a twin bed tucked into the narrow hallway leading back toward the laundry room.
Out in the yard and under the hood of old cars, Gene taught his son how to rebuild engines and keep aging trucks running. That mechanical work later became the subject of Jackson’s 1994 chart-topping single, “Small Town Southern Man,” which chronicled a working father raising five children with calloused hands and quiet faith, as well as his 2002 tribute song, “Drive (For Daddy Gene).”
In the early 1990s, after hits from Here in the Real World and Don’t Rock the Jukebox turned Jackson into one of Nashville’s highest-earning artists, he tried to persuade his parents to move into a newly built house. Neither Gene nor Ruth wanted to leave the boards Gene had measured and nailed together himself.
Recognizing that his parents would never move, Jackson looked for ways to honor them within the life they already loved. At Christmas in 1992, he quietly paid off the remaining mortgage on the College Street property and handed them the clear deed.
The following year, for Christmas 1993, Alan and his wife, Denise, tracked down a white 1955 Ford Thunderbird matching the car Gene had owned as a young man before selling it to cover family expenses. Alongside the Thunderbird, Jackson also wrote and recorded “Home,” a track first released on his 1990 debut album that documented his parents’ start in the twelve-by-twelve shed and the pride that kept them rooted in Georgia.
When Gene passed away in January 2000 at age 72, Alan and his four sisters again asked their mother to move closer to family or into a newer house. Known affectionately to fans and neighbors as Mama Ruth, she chose to stay right where she and Gene had raised their children.
For the next seventeen years, tour buses and cars with out-of-state license plates regularly slowed down outside 101 College Street as country music fans hoped for a glimpse of the house from Jackson’s songs. Rather than closing the curtains, Ruth often walked out to the front porch, talked with visitors, and invited strangers into her living room for glasses of iced tea and a look at Alan’s childhood photographs.
Ruth kept up that quiet hospitality until she passed away at home on January 7, 2017, at age 86. Following her passing, she was laid to rest beside Gene at Oak Hill Cemetery in Newnan.
Throughout all the years his mother lived alone in the house, Jackson made the trip down from his properties in Tennessee whenever his touring schedule allowed. Each time he pulled into the driveway on College Street, the six-foot-four singer ducked his head beneath the low doorframe his father had built decades earlier and sat with his mother at the small kitchen table at the heart of the old tool shed.
