The Old Rugged Cross (Alan Jackson)

Alan Jackson made Precious Memories, a full album of traditional gospel hymns, as a 2006 Mother’s Day gift for his own mother, who had been asking him for a gospel record for a decade – a request that finally became a full album after Jackson recorded “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” for his father-in-law’s funeral and the rest of the family pushed him to keep going. It’s a personal project rather than a chart play, released at a point in his career when he had nothing left to prove commercially. His recording of “The Old Rugged Cross” on that album has been widely cited, among the record’s 28 tracks, as the strongest, and the reasons why are audible from the first verse: a warm, settled baritone that sounds like it’s singing to a room rather than performing for a radio audience, backed by a gentle, mostly acoustic arrangement that leaves plenty of space around the vocal.

What keeps this version distinct from Willie Nelson’s similarly understated reading is a slightly fuller, more deliberately “produced” sound – a light touch of steel guitar, backing harmonies that swell in just enough to mark the hymn’s emotional high points without turning them into a dynamic centerpiece the way Mahalia Jackson’s version does. It’s a middle path between the other two recordings reviewed this week: more arranged than Nelson’s bare reading, more restrained than Jackson’s full-voiced gospel performance, and comfortable occupying that middle ground rather than reaching past it.

The context matters here more than it does for most hymn covers. This wasn’t a career move or a genre experiment – it was a working country star making an album specifically because his mother asked him to, and that specific, personal motivation is audible in a vocal performance that never once sounds like it’s trying to impress anyone beyond the one listener who requested it.

7.8/10 – a sincere, warmly arranged reading that splits the difference between devotional plainness and Nashville polish, and does right by both.

Hero image: Alan Jackson performing at the Pentagon, September 2002. Public domain (U.S. government work).