When Alan Jackson’s “Sissy’s Song” climbed into the country Top 10 in 2009, the recording coming out of the radio had a history unlike almost any other hit. It was not a new studio version. It was the very same recording that had been played two years earlier at the funeral of the woman the song was written for.
“This is the same track that we played at the funeral,” Alan Jackson explained on his website.
The Woman Everyone Called Sissy
Her real name was Leslie Fitzgerald. In the Jackson household, everyone called her Sissy. She looked after the whole house, and she was there every day. Alan Jackson spoke of her as someone he saw every day, like family.
The bond ran deeper than one job. Her husband, an expert car restorer, also worked for the Jacksons. Together they had a daughter and a son.
On May 20, 2007, Sissy was killed in a motorcycle accident. She was in her 40s. Jackson later said that losing someone that young, someone they saw daily, hit him and the whole family hard. He pointed out that you brace for death with the elderly, not with a young woman taken in an accident.
The Song He Wrote When He Couldn’t Sleep
The loss hit Alan Jackson hard. “I didn’t sleep for a while,” he admitted.
One day he sat down and wrote a song for her. He said that once it was written, “after that I felt alright.”
He went into the studio with his longtime producer, Keith Stegall, and they cut it about as simply as a song can be cut. Jackson described it this way:
“It’s just me and the guitar and the harmony parts.”
He recorded it for one purpose. Jackson gave the recording to the Fitzgerald family so it could be played at Sissy’s funeral. The woman it was written for never heard a note of it.
From a Funeral to the Radio
Then people at his record label heard it. By Jackson’s account, everybody wanted it on his next album.
That album was Good Time, released in 2008, and Alan Jackson wrote every one of its 17 songs himself. It became a No. 1 album, and it produced three straight No. 1 singles: “Small Town Southern Man,” “Good Time” and “Country Boy.”
“Sissy’s Song” came next. Released in March 2009 as the album’s fourth single, it reached No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and No. 6 on the Canadian country chart. To date, it is the last Top 10 country hit Alan Jackson has scored as a solo artist.
A song made for one grieving family ended up on country radio across North America.
A Country Church and a Song That Comforts
The music video, directed by Scott Scovill, was filmed in black and white at Bear Creek Church in Culleoka, Tennessee, about 60 miles south of Nashville. The church and its cemetery have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1985. The video shows Alan Jackson performing the song there.
Jackson said he was proud of “Sissy’s Song” because so many people told him it made them feel better.
It is a fitting legacy for a woman who spent her days taking care of a family. Every time the song plays, her name goes with it.
Did you ever have someone like Sissy in your life, someone who was simply always there?