Tony Jackson`s One-Sheet

So Tony Jackson is up there on stage, and he’s singing . . .
Step right up, come on in if you’d like to take the grand tour
Of a lonely house that once was home sweet home.
Jackson knows how to work a bar crowd. He’s done it for
years. How to hone his voice to that sharp, emphatic edge
that slices through the noise, and tones down the loud table
conversations and clinking bottles. But tonight is different.
This is the Old Dominion Barn Dance with an older, more
sedate audience—one not primed for partying by alcohol and
visions of late-night hookups. They’re polite and attentive,
of course, but they’ve still got that make-me-care look on their
faces. So he drives deeper into the mournful George Jones classic.
I have nothing here to sell you, just some things that I will tell you,
Some things I know will chill you to the bone.
Then he notices the iPhone cameras popping up all along the front row. This is good. This is a sign.
As you leave you’ll see the nursery, oh she left me without mercy
Taking nothing but our baby and my heart.
As the last note dissolves into memory, the crowd springs to its feet. Not just a few people, mind you,
but all of them. Jackson bows and sweeps his arm back toward the band. And still they cheer.
Presenting
Tony Jackson is now a regular performer on the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Virginia and
almost certainly the only Bank of America official ever to enjoy a thriving parallel career in country
music. Apart from fronting around 75 shows this year, Jackson is currently recording a project in
Nashville that will embrace both his original songs and such revered standards as the wistful “Do I
Ever Cross Your Mind” and the irrepressibly sunny “Bummin’ Around.”
Jackson didn’t grow up a fan of country music. Nor was he swept into it after it surged in popularity in
the 1990s. The son of a Navy man, he was raised primarily in Virginia. But like most military kids, he led
a base-to-base existence, at one point living with his family in Rota, Spain for three years. He concedes
that his early musical background was sketchy at best. “I sang in the Christmas play in the sixth grade,”
he recalls. “I had a solo—‘White Christmas.’ Everybody seemed to love it, but I was a wreck. My mother
forced me to sing in the church choir, but I was kind of buried in the voices along with everybody else.”
This was basically his whole musical resume until “eight or nine years ago” when a friend whose band
had lost its lead singer asked Jackson to try out for the spot. “I did,” he says, “and I was hooked after
that.”
Two weeks after graduating from high school, Jackson joined the Marines. “I told my dad I was joining
because I was sick of taking orders,” he says with a wry grin. There was as much getting-ahead as
gung-ho in Jackson’s enlistment. “I was a computer and electronics geek as a teenager,” he says.
“When I talked to the recruiter, he told me the Marine Corps had just started a computer science school
in Quantico, Virginia. Fortunately, I scored high enough on the entrance exam to go to that school.”
It was a smart move. When he finished service, the Bank of America in Richmond snapped him up
to work in its Information Technology division, initially assigning him the lowly chore of re-setting
passwords. “I was way overqualified,” he says, “but all I knew was I didn’t have to get up at 5:30 in
the morning anymore and go running around in the mountains. I’d come into the bank around 8 o’clock,
re-set specific passwords and I’m good. I got promoted fast. I was a senior vice president by my early
30s. Now I manage the network operations center for the bank.”
It was while in the Marines that he first started paying serious attention to country music. “My mother
listened only to gospel,” he says. “My dad was into jazz, hip hop, R&B, new jack swing—stuff like that.
But Armed Forces Radio played everything. When I was living in Spain—when I was 10 to 13—Randy
Travis came over there on a USO tour. Some friends and I were out there early when they were setting
up the stage, and we actually got to talk to him before we realized he was the guy who’d be performing later. He was really cool to us. In the Marine Corps, when my friends and I played music for each
other, we were all homesick. So when you’d listen to these country songs that talked about family and
home and heartbreak, it would really grab you. It was a combination of those things that got country
on my radar.”
A song that particularly appealed to Jackson was George Jones’ “The Grand Tour.” When Jones died,
Jackson and some friends went into a studio and recorded it. In the process, they also made a
performance video that eventually wound up on YouTube. Somehow, singer Donna Meade saw the
video then circulating around Richmond and decided Jackson should do “The Grand Tour” on the Old
Dominion Barn Dance, which she had just resurrected. A commanding performer in her own right,
Meade is also the widow of Country Music Hall of Fame member Jimmy Dean and a zealous guardia
of his vast musical legacy. After she witnessed Jackson’s standing ovation—an honor that hadn’t yet
been accorded to any of the show’s headliners—she offered to co-manage and co-produce him with
noted talent manager Jim Della Croce.
Meade and Della Croce then whisked Jackson to Nashville to record at the hallowed RCA Records
Studio C, where he is now well into completing a projected EP. Jackson is no newcomer to Nashville,
however. He and his band—Jackson Ward—recorded a CD there in 2013 and performed at Tootsie’s
and Honk Tonk Central, two of Music City’s brightest beacons for live shows.
In 2016, Meade and Della Croce will take Jackson’s original composition and first single, “Drink By
Drink,” to radio and iTunes. In it, listeners will discover one of the strongest, most emotionally
engaging voices since Randy Travis blew the doors off country music in 1985 and ushered in a new
era. Until then, folks can sample Jackson’s magic at www.tonyjacksonmusic.com.
So step right up. Come on in.
Management & Booking:
Donna Dean-Stevens & Jim Della Croce 615.419.9989
[email protected]
Label:
DDS Entertainment Nashville, TN
Produced by Donna Dean-Stevens & Jim Della Croce
Recorded at RCA Studio A and RCA Studio C Nashville, TN
Engineered by Eddie Gore
Public Relations:
The Press Office [email protected]
Radio Promotion:
Tim McFadden TZM Promotions
[email protected]
Ann Chrisman [email protected]
Regina Raleigh [email protected]
Photography: Art Direction:
Chick Alcorn
Jim Shea
www.tonyjacksonmusic.com