Songfacts®:

• "Drive (For Daddy Gene)" is Alan Jackson's tribute to his late father, Eugene ("Gene") Jackson, who died on January 31, 2000, from an aortic aneurysm. Jackson wrote the song himself but struggled for a while to find the right approach. "My daddy died a few years ago, and I wanted to write something for him. I tried a couple of times, and I always ended up writing some sad dying song," he told Billboard. "I didn't want to do that. I wanted to write something nice."
  
  The solution he arrived at was rooted in a simple, joyful truth: "Daddy didn't say much, but one of the things he really gave me is my love for cars, and this whole song is a bunch of facts, really."
• The song unfolds in three chapters, each centered on the act of driving as a metaphor for love and trust passed between generations. The first verse recalls Jackson and his father buying a secondhand boat and taking it out on a lake across the Alabama line. The second verse shifts to an old hand-me-down Ford truck, with Jackson learning to work the three-speed column gearshift as a boy. In the final verse, the story comes full circle; Jackson is now the father, letting his own three daughters drive his Jeep around their pasture, continuing the tradition his dad started.
• Released on January 28, 2002 as the second single from Jackson's 10th album, Drive, the song topped the Country chart in May 2002 and also crossed over to peak at #28 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Directed by Steven Goldmann and animated by The Illusion Factory, the video presents the story as animated illustrations coming to life out of the pages of a book - a technique reminiscent of the iconic pencil-sketch animation used in A-ha's classic 1985 clip for "Take On Me." It follows the song's narrative - a boy and his father driving a speedboat and later a truck - and finds Jackson driving around with his three real-life daughters for the final verse, though notably in a Ford Bronco rather than the Jeep mentioned in the lyrics. It won Best Music Video at the Country Music Awards.