Country music superstar Alan Jackson releases his first bluegrass album – appropriately titled The Bluegrass Album – on September 20th. Jackson wrote eight songs for the album, which also includes other originals and a couple of well-known standards of the genre.

Jackson has openly expressed his desire to record a bluegrass album for years. This spring, a group of some of the best players and singers in bluegrass came together, emerging in a matter of days with the completed acoustic album. He enlisted Scott Coney (acoustic guitar), Sammy Shelor (banjo), Adam Steffey (mandolin), Tim Crouch (fiddle), Tim Dishman (bass), Rob Ickes (dobro) and Ronnie Bowman and Don Rigsby (vocals).

Originals that Jackson penned for the album include such titles as “Blacktop,” “Blue Ridge Mountain Song” and “Mary.” Covers on The Bluegrass Album include The Dillards’ “There Is A Time,” John Anderson’s “Wild and Blue” and a ¾-time version of Bill Monroe’s seminal “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

Alan Jackson is one of the most successful and respected singer-songwriters in music.  He is in the elite company of Paul McCartney and John Lennon among songwriters who’ve written more than 20 songs that they’ve recorded and taken to the top of the charts.  Jackson is one of the 10 best-selling artists since the inception of SoundScan, ranking alongside the likes of Eminem and Metallica.  His most recent album, Thirty Miles West, topped the country chart when it was released in June 2012 – the album features the Grammy®-nominated song, “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore.”

Jackson has sold nearly 60 million albums worldwide, topped the country singles charts 35 times, and scored more than 50 Top-10 hits.  He has written or co-written 24 of his 35 #1 hit singles.  Jackson is an 18-time ACM Award winner, a 16-time CMA Award recipient, and a two-time Grammy-winning artist whose song writing has earned him the prestigious ASCAP Founders Award and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame as a 2011 Songwriter/Artist inductee.