The Jeep rolled across a Tennessee pasture with three small girls at the wheel and their famous father beside them. In that quiet moment Alan Jackson was not a country star. He was a son again, back in Georgia beside Daddy Gene.
More than a year after his father died in January 2000, Jackson lifted Mattie, Ali, and Dani onto his lap in a Jeep outside Nashville and let them steer. Watching them guide the vehicle across the grass brought back Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson, the Ford Motor Company assembly plant mechanic from Hapeville, Georgia, who raised his family in Newnan and died at 72.
Eugene was a man of few words. He was the only son among five children in Newnan, and he raised four daughters and one son of his own. Rather than long speeches, he built a bond with young Alan through worn-out machines he bought cheaply, repaired by hand, and handed over for his boy to learn on.
First came a leaky plywood boat patched with marine glue and pushed across the Chattahoochee and West Point Lake waters by a 7.5-horsepower outboard motor. Eugene sat back while Alan took the tiller. Later came a beat-up olive-green World War II army Jeep. On Coweta County’s red dirt roads and open pastures, the father rode quietly in the passenger seat and let the boy figure out the gears and the gas pedal on his own.
He was not chasing a hit. He was trying to sit beside his father one more time.
After Alan became one of country music’s leading recording artists in Nashville, the roles shifted. He bought his father brand-new pickup trucks to replace the patched-up rigs Eugene had spent a lifetime fixing by hand.
Then came the afternoon in Tennessee with his daughters gripping the wheel. Jackson sat down with his guitar in 2001 and turned the plywood boat, the army Jeep, and his girls into a solo-written ballad called “Drive (For Daddy Gene).”
Working with longtime producer Keith Stegall, Jackson recorded the track in late 2001 as the centerpiece of his tenth studio album, Drive. Arista Nashville released the album on January 15, 2002. Sent to country radio that March as the second single, the song climbed to Number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in May 2002 and held the top spot for four consecutive weeks. It also reached Number 28 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100.
For television, Jackson teamed with director Steven Goldmann in spring 2002 to film a music video at Franklin Lake in Tennessee. Goldmann intercut vintage 8mm Jackson family home movies of Eugene with staged scenes of Mattie, Ali, and Dani steering a Jeep alongside their father. Child actors recreated Alan’s boyhood days in a wooden boat and an olive-drab military vehicle.
That blend of family archive and lakeside filming resonated across the industry. In November 2002 the recording was named Single of the Year at the 36th Annual CMA Awards. In May 2003 it earned Video of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards.
Across four minutes of acoustic guitar and steel, Jackson never mentioned his father’s funeral or the grief of January 2000. He simply traced the quiet trust passed from a Georgia mechanic in a passenger seat to a father watching three little girls steer across an open field.