RANDY ROGERS BAND feat. PARKER McCOLLUM - "Tommy Jackson" - Big Loud Records

If you’ve been to a Randy Rogers Band show, you know how this goes. At some point in the night, someone near the back shouts for “Tommy Jackson,” and before long half the room is asking for it too. The song has been around since the band’s 2002 debut, Like It Used to Be, and the crowd still hasn’t let go of it. So it says a lot that the band chose it to open Songbook, their 25th-anniversary album of songs shared with other artists. They could have led with something safer or more radio-friendly. Instead they went with a dark, slow-burning story song about a kid who doesn’t make it, kept what made it work, and simply made room for one more voice.

Randy wrote this on his own at 19, while he was a student at Texas State in San Marcos, after a conversation with Bill Whitbeck, Robert Earl Keen’s bass player. You can hear that influence all over it. The song never stops to explain what happened or who’s to blame. It just hands you details: a granddaddy’s farm 80 miles east of the line, a night in the barn, a stolen Ford, 15 days on the road, a job at Fritz’s muffler shop. It feels like a story someone heard down at the feed store and has been retelling ever since. Plenty of writers spend years learning to get out of the way of their own song. He figured it out before he could legally buy a beer.

This is an old-fashioned Texas murder ballad, and nobody comes out of it well. Tommy is 18 and on the run, haunted by his ex-wife and the thought of a jail cell. He sleeps a night in the narrator’s granddaddy’s barn, takes the family Ford, and drives until his money runs out at an eastbound truck stop. There he goes to work for Fritz, a good man whose wife, Pamela, seems to have a nice life on the surface. Then the whiskey comes out, and you can see where it’s headed.

The best part is the narrator. It was his gun Tommy used, yet he opens the song almost indifferent, saying the man who died “never mattered much to me.” That coldness is what makes the final verse hurt. Pam visits the grave every Sunday morning to tell Tommy she never wanted things this way, and then comes the line “Rest in peace, Tommy Jackson, 1981.” After keeping its distance for so long, the song finally lets itself grieve, and it lands harder because it waited.

“Isn’t love a funny thing with a pistol in your hand” is still one of the best chorus lines Texas country has produced.

Most songs from a band’s first record quietly fade from the set list. This one went the other way, and the chorus is a big reason why. Half warning, half prayer, it tells Tommy to close his eyes and bow his head “to pray if you can,” then reminds him he sealed his fate when he picked up that gun. It’s grim stuff, but in a dance hall full of longnecks it turns into a singalong, and somehow the whole room feels closer for it.

Parker McCollum wasn’t handed this song. He chose it. He has talked about how much “Tommy Jackson” meant to him early on and how it led him to write his own “My Blues.” That’s what makes this feel genuine instead of two names paired up for a playlist. Texas music has always worked this way. Keen’s bass player sparked something in Randy, Randy’s song sparked something in Parker, and now they’re singing it together on the same record. It’s a family tree you can actually hear.

The line “18 years of getting older” sounds different now, too. Coming from a college kid in 2002, it was part of a story. Coming from Randy after more than two decades on the road, it carries real weight. Same words, different man singing them, and the song is better for it.

As the first look at Songbook, this was the right song to lead with. It doesn’t feel like a victory lap or a nostalgia trip. It feels like something being passed down, with one generation of Texas songwriters sharing a story with the next while they can still sing it together. Longtime fans finally get a fresh version of the song they’ve been calling for, and newer listeners who came in through Parker get to hear where some of his instincts came from. Good story songs don’t really age. They just wait for the right voices to bring them back. Put this one on during a long drive, wait for that last verse, and see if it doesn’t get you. January 22 can’t get here soon enough.

(Review Written By: Dave Pierce)