Country music, by God.
Last night, CMT aired its 2022 Artists of the Year special, honoring Cody Johnson, Luke Combs, Carly Pearce, Walker Hayes, and Kane Brown.
And his greatness, the legendary Alan Jackson, was presented with the Artist of a Lifetime award while Lainey Wilson was give the Breakout Artist of the Year award.
The evening featured performances and presentations, but anytime Alan Jackson is in the room, is has to be the highlight of the night.
The instant the first note of that iconic intro riff came ringing out from that Telecaster, the entire room was on their feet.
During his acceptance speech, Alan took the opportunity to honor the late country legend, Loretta Lynn.
“The first thing is I wanna say is there will never be another Loretta Lynn, that touched my heart.. she was always so nice to me and we had a good friendship. I just really appreciated her, and we’re gonna miss you, sugar.”
He also recalled some of the legendary music videos he recorded over his career:
“I think I’ve made more videos than anybody in the world. After ‘Chattahoochee’ I was the first action video artist and then I went on to drive trucks in the mud, NASCAR race cars, and I jumped Bigfoot, the monster truck, I jumped it over six cars one time… and I did all that stuff. Sang on the top of skyscrapers, the bow of the boat in the ocean singing with my bad…
But I always believed the videos were important to the music and I thought people would watch CMT in the background and listen to the music when they might not hear it on the radio and I still believe that.”
And then he capped it off with a great story about being in the Bahamas:
“About two years ago, it was about 5 o’clock… somewhere… all the sudden I started hearing all these songs of mine. All the big hits you’d expect and then all these obsucre song that I hadn’t heard in forever.
I kept hearing this voice singing along with it and I looked over that and it was this young, big ol’ black Bahamian bartender, and he was singing at the top of his voice, all my songs, and he sang pretty good.
He came over and said ‘hi’ and he was a fan of course, so I asked him where he heard all them old song songs, some of them I haven’t heard myself in years. And he said “I got them all on my computer, I got them off CMT, they’re all your videos.”
So I realized that some people don’t have country radio and nowadays they just get the videos, and all the work I did all those years paid off.”
Gotta love it.
Now, if only CMT still played country music videos…
Sorry, couldn’t help it… God bless Alan Jackson.
