On the night of October 30, 2022, Alan Jackson sat on a stool in the famous circle at the center of the Grand Ole Opry House stage, an acoustic guitar in his hands, and sang “Where Her Heart Has Always Been.” It was not a Loretta Lynn song. He had written it in January 2017, the day before he buried his mother, Ruth. Twenty-six days after Loretta died, he asked her family if he could sing it for her.
A memorial built on her own songs
Loretta Lynn died in her sleep on the morning of October 4, 2022, at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90. Her family asked for privacy and said a public memorial would come later.
That memorial became Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Celebration of the Life & Music of Loretta Lynn, broadcast live and commercial-free on CMT from the Opry House and hosted by Jenna Bush Hager, a close friend of the family. Almost everyone who came sang Loretta’s own records. George Strait did “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).” Darius Rucker took on “Fist City.” Tanya Tucker sang “Blue Kentucky Girl,” and Margo Price sang “The Pill,” the 1975 single some radio stations refused to play.
Alan Jackson was one of the few exceptions.
What he never told her
Before he played, Jackson thanked the Lynn family for letting him sing a song of his own. Then he explained why he had chosen it.
I never told [Lynn] this, but she reminded me a lot of my momma.
The two women looked a little alike, he said, and their personalities were close too. Both were outgoing, sweet and genuine, and both would tell you exactly what was on their minds. He added that Loretta had been kind to him from the day he first stepped onto that stage some 30 years earlier, and that when he was asked to sing for her, the words of his mother’s song simply felt right.
He sang it softly, backed by fiddle and guitar. When he finished, the room stood.
The song written the day before a funeral
Ruth Musick Jackson, known to his fans as Mama Ruth, was born in Lowell, Georgia, in 1930. She married Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson in 1946, when she was 16. They raised Alan and his four sisters in a small house in Newnan built around an old tool shed, the same house he later described in his song “Home.”
She died in that house on January 7, 2017, at 86. Alan had written for a parent once before. After Daddy Gene died in 2000, he wrote “Drive (For Daddy Gene),” which went to No. 1. For his mother, he wrote “Where Her Heart Has Always Been” the day before her funeral.
On January 12, 2017, hundreds of people filled Central Baptist Church in Newnan. Jackson sang the new song, then joined his sisters on the hymn “I Want to Stroll Over Heaven with You.” Ruth was laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery. He had sung at funerals before, including George Jones’s, but he said this one was the toughest gig he had ever had.
Four years later he recorded the song for Where Have You Gone, his first album in six years. After the track had been cut, one of his sisters sent him an old recording of their mother reading from the Bible, something he had never heard. He placed her voice at the very beginning of the song, and that is how it opens today.
The night Loretta left the house for him
Nine months after Mama Ruth’s funeral, on October 22, 2017, Jackson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. By tradition, a standing member welcomes each new inductee. Jackson asked for Loretta Lynn.
He made that request knowing she was recovering from a serious stroke she had suffered on May 5. She had canceled her tour, postponed an album and had not appeared in Nashville since. When she was introduced in the Hall’s CMA Theater, George Strait and her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell helped her to the podium, and the crowd rose.
She joked that this was the first time she had been out of the house. She remembered meeting Jackson when he was a nervous young singer who, she said, looked like a scared little boy, and knowing even then that he would become one of the greatest singers in country music.
He hadn’t let me down.
She placed the medallion around his neck. Jackson told the room that if Loretta Lynn said he belonged there, that was all he needed to hear. The night ended the way every induction ends, with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” led by Connie Smith with Alan Jackson, George Strait and Loretta singing along.
Twenty-six days
When Loretta died in 2022, Jackson posted a photo of the two of them and wrote that there would never be another honky-tonk girl like her.
Twenty-six days later, George Strait, who had helped her onto the Hall of Fame stage five years earlier, sang one of her hits at her memorial. Alan Jackson, the man she had left her house for, brought the one song he had written to say goodbye to his mother.