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When twenty-seven-year-old Alan Jackson walked into the offices of Glen Campbell’s Seventh Son Music in Nashville, publishing manager Marty Gamblin put him on the payroll as an apprentice songwriter at a hundred dollars a week.
A few months earlier, in October 1985, Alan and his wife, Denise, had loaded their belongings into a rented U-Haul truck and left Newnan, Georgia, with no recording contract. Before that move, they had spent the first six years of their marriage living in a cramped Georgia basement apartment while Alan sold shoes and cars, worked construction, and drove a forklift in a Kmart warehouse.
Ready to give up on music at twenty-six because he thought he was getting too old, Alan stayed in the game after Denise pushed him to take the risk. Working a flight attendant shift, she approached Glen Campbell at the Atlanta airport to ask for advice and came home with Gamblin’s business card.
Once they arrived in Tennessee, Alan took his first job sorting fan mail in the basement mailroom at The Nashville Network, pushing a mail cart past stars his own age like Randy Travis while slipping his demo tapes to producers. Soon after, Gamblin followed through on the airport introduction and hired him as a staff writer at Seventh Son Music.
For the next four years, Denise’s flight attendant paycheck kept food on the table in their small apartment. While she worked back-to-back airline shifts and helped copy his lyric sheets by hand, Alan spent his weekdays inside the publishing house learning how to structure three-minute country songs.
By day, he worked alongside fellow songwriters such as Roger Murrah and cut demo tracks in the publishing studio. By night, he formed his touring band, the Strayhorns, and pulled a white cowboy hat low over a childhood forehead scar to sing in small bars and clubs.
During those years at Seventh Son Music, Gamblin acted as his manager and pitched Alan’s demos across Music Row, only to watch several major labels pass on his traditional honky-tonk sound.
That string of rejections ended when producer Keith Stegall heard Alan’s voice and began working with him in the studio, helping shape the stripped-down country sound he had been playing in nightclubs. In 1989, executive Tim DuBois arrived in Nashville to launch the country division of Arista Records.
Looking for a flagship singer to anchor the new roster, DuBois and Stegall signed Alan in June 1989 as the very first recording artist on Arista Nashville. Paired with Stegall in the producer’s chair, Alan went into the studio to record his debut album, bringing along the songs he had honed during his hundred-dollar-a-week publishing years.
In early 1990, Arista released his breakthrough single and title track, “Here in the Real World,” which became the first of four major hits from the album in the same year Alan and Denise welcomed their first daughter, Mattie. The follow-up 1991 album, *Don’t Rock the Jukebox*, produced five straight number-one country singles, four of which Alan wrote or co-wrote while continuing to publish through Seventh Son Music and his own Mattie Ruth Musick company.
His collaborations with Stegall and Murrah during that era yielded signature records that carried him from small bar stages to Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music honors.
Twenty-eight years after signing that June 1989 Arista contract, Alan stepped up to the medallion ceremony podium in October 2017 to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Looking out at the room, he credited the wife whose airline shifts had carried them from a rented U-Haul truck and a TNN mail cart to country music history.
