Alan Jackson spent his whole life surrounded by women. He grew up in Newnan, Georgia, the only boy after four older sisters, and he went on to raise three daughters of his own with his wife, Denise: Mattie, Ali and Dani. So when his oldest, Mattie, married a young Tennessee lawyer named Ben Selecman in October 2017, Alan gained something he had never had before. He had a boy in the family.
He later said a son-in-law meant someone to go fishing with and work on cars beside. It lasted less than a year.
The young man who drove four hours for dinner
Mattie and Ben first met at a mutual friend’s wedding. She remembered dancing with a guy she thought was cute and then not thinking much about him afterward. Ben pursued her. When he asked her out, she said no.
He kept trying. Roughly two years after that first meeting, while Ben was spending a summer in Nashville clerking for a judge during law school, he called again. This time she said yes, and he drove almost four hours just to take her to dinner.
Ben was a Knoxville native who earned his law degree at the University of Memphis’s Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. He proposed during a picnic on the Old Natchez Trace, with wine, cheese and a dance.
The wedding took place in October 2017 on the Jackson family property in Franklin, Tennessee. Ben was closely involved in planning it, and the couple kept one surprise from both families. For their first dance, they two-stepped to one of Alan’s early hits, the very first single he ever sent to country radio.
The song in the truck
Alan had written a song for his daughters’ weddings. It was called “You’ll Always Be My Baby,” and he wanted Ben to hear it.
There was no good way to play the demo inside the house, so they went out to the garage and sat in a truck to listen. Alan later recalled that Ben got emotional and told him it was just perfect, or something close to that.
September 2018
Less than a year into the marriage, Ben was on a trip to Florida. In early September 2018, in West Palm Beach, he slipped on a boat dock while helping a woman onto a boat and struck his head. The fall left him with severe traumatic head injuries.
He never recovered. Ben Selecman died on September 12, 2018. He was 28 years old and worked as an assistant district attorney in Davidson County, Tennessee, the office that prosecutes cases in Nashville.
Alan’s team released a short statement asking fans to pray for both the Jackson and Selecman families. Years later, on the anniversary of his death, Mattie shared a photo of the two of them holding hands on a boat dock. She described it as the last picture they had together before the accident.
Angry at the world
Alan later admitted that when Ben died, he was angry at the world. Losing him so suddenly, he said, was jarring to the whole family.
I lost something I’d never had before.
At the time, he had been working on a new album. He set it aside.
The record finally arrived on May 14, 2021, as Where Have You Gone, his first album of new material in six years. Among its songs was “You’ll Always Be My Baby,” the same wedding song Ben had first heard sitting in that truck in the garage.
Pain with a purpose
Mattie became a widow at 28. Only two months before the accident, she and her business partner, Brooke Tometich, had begun building a small Nashville organization called NaSHEville to support orphans, victims of human trafficking and widows.
Ben had been part of it from the start. Mattie said he helped them build its infrastructure, and his work as a prosecutor shaped its mission. He was the one who urged the group to focus on trafficking victims, the people he saw in his own cases.
After his death, one part of that mission suddenly described her. Mattie later said she became the poster child for the widows NaSHEville was meant to serve. She kept going anyway.
I’m not gonna let this pain lack purpose.
Racing the Dark
Mattie also began to write. Her first book, Lemons on Friday, published by Thomas Nelson in November 2021 with a foreword by her mother, Denise Jackson, told the story of losing Ben after about 11 months of marriage and how her faith carried her through it.
Along with the book came a song. Mattie wrote a set of lyrics and brought them to her father on paper. Alan wrote the melody. He said it turned out to be a very sweet song, and he admitted he was surprised at how well she had been able to handle everything.
“Racing the Dark” was released on November 16, 2021, the same day as the book.
What came after
In 2023 she married Connor Smith, and on June 20, 2024, she gave birth to a son, Wesley Alan Smith. Her second book, Through the Valley of Grief, looks back on life as a young widow and on finding love again.
She still marks September 12. On one anniversary she wrote that she had been asking for Ben to see the joy in her life now, the new book, Connor’s love and learning to be a mother.
The boy Alan Jackson could fish with was part of his family for less than a year. The wedding song Ben heard in that truck is still on the record.