Alan Jackson wrote a song especially for his daughters’ weddings, and in a new interview, he shares the reaction his late son-in-law had upon hearing the track.
Jackson’s new single is “You’ll Always Be My Baby,” a song from his current album, Where Have You Gone. He wrote the song to serve as his daughters’ wedding song, and in an interview with his label, the country icon says that while all three of his daughters found the song touching, his son-in-law, Ben Selecman — who was married to Jackson’s oldest daughter, Mattie — had a particularly strong reaction to hearing it for the first time.
“I remember we were at home and said we had written this thing. I had a rough demo of it or something,” Jackson shares. “And we went out in the garage and sat in the truck because I didn’t have any way to play it in the house. I don’t know what I had … I may have had a CD or something. I don’t remember now. And we played it and I remember him looking emotional about it and saying that was just perfect or something to that effect.
“And that stuck with me,” the country legend says, “And he’s — it was Mattie’s husband who died accidentally after not quite the first year they were married. So that was a nice memory to have of that.”
Selecman died in 2018 after suffering a traumatic head injury from a fall while helping a woman onto a boat in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 28 years old. Jackson was working on an album at the time that he ultimately shelved as he went through the grieving process, and the country superstar admits he felt anger following Selecman’s untimely death.
“When he died, I was kind of pissed off at the world. I just wasn’t feeling right about anything,” he told HITS Daily Double.
Jackson grew up in a house full of women, and he and his wife have three daughters and no sons. “It’s all I was ever around: girls and women. So having a son-in-law was having a boy I could fish with, work on cars and stuff with. It was tough losing him so suddenly — so jarring to all of us. I lost something I’d never had before,” he explained.
Jackson released Where Have You Gone, his first album in six years, on May 14.
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