RIP Tom T. Hall, Who Knew a Good Story When He Sang One
Tom T. Hall wrote a lot of songs, some terrific and a few that were, frankly, terrible.
The good ones outrun the bad ones, and when Hall died Friday at his Franklin, Tenn., home, age 85, he was properly hailed as one of country music’s ace songwriters.
He was also a successful recording artist, scoring a half-dozen number-one hits like “A Week in a Country Jail,” “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wind” and “I Love.”
He called himself a reluctant singer and stage performer, but on a purely personal note, one of the most memorable concerts I ever saw was the double bill of Hall and Jerry Lee Lewis at a Virginia high school in 1971.
Hall also had at least one basset hound, and that says as many good things about him as his songwriting.
Hall was informally nicknamed “The Storyteller,” because his best songs tended to be short stories centering on an incident or a character.
He said he learned to tell a story from his early interest in journalism and a radio job writing advertising copy. “You’ve got a three-story department store and you have to tell everything that’s in it in one minute,” he mused years later.
That sort of bemused philosophizing permeated Hall’s best songs, like “The Year Clayton Delaney Died.”
Clayton Delaney was a pseudonym for a real-life guitarist with whom Hall was fascinated when Hall was a young teenager and starting to think about becoming a musician.
While there are plenty of songs about music and guitar idols, Clayton Delaney wasn’t exactly the classic mentor.
“Clayton used to tell me son, you better put that old guitar away,” Hall sang. “There ain’t no money in it, it’ll lead you to an early grave.”
Clayton died young. The real-life Clayton was only 19 or 20. Hall’s song painted him as an elite artist who left a dignified and valuable legacy.
Hall was similarly unsentimental in one of his other best songs, “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine.”
The story was told through the eyes of a bored conventioneer who was killing time at a nondescript hotel bar when an elderly cleaning man sat down next to him and volunteered that the only things of lasting value in life were, well, old dogs, children and watermelon wine.
Old dogs because “they love you even when you make mistakes,” children “when they’re still too young to hate” and watermelon wine, well, he never did explain that one.
“Old Dogs” could easily have become gooey with sentiment. It didn’t. It was matter of fact, and it ended with the cleaning man scooping up the tip that the singer left for the bartender, who was preoccupied watching Ironside.
Hall was particularly good at inserting the right little crumbs of detail into his songs, a skill at which he may have peaked with “Ballad of Forty Dollars.”
That amusing tale is told by a gravedigger watching the funeral of a man he knew, first digging the grave, then polishing off a few beers while he waits for the service to end so he can fill it in. The details are fascinating: The widow looks good in black, “but you can’t tell much behind a veil.” The car looks so sharp the singer can’t resist sneaking down to check it out. The punchline — no spoilers here — sticks the landing.
Hall took a similar approach, almost reportorial, in songs like “Ravishing Ruby,” “I Flew Over Our House Last Night” and “Fox on the Run,” which marked his shift over to a bluegrass style when his more traditional country career was winding down.
“Margie’s At the Lincoln Park Inn,” a hit for Bobby Bare, applied Hall’s clear-eyed approach to that most cherished of country themes, the cheating song. It’s the story of the all-American Dad who resists temptation right up to the end, when “I’m almost out of cigarettes / And Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn.”
There’s less nuance in Hall’s most famous song, “Harper Valley PTA.” He was only the writer on that one, which was enough. Jeannie C. Riley’s number-one hit version in 1968 launched his career and bought him and his second wife Dixie their 67-acre Tennessee ranch.
“Harper Valley PTA,” about a miniskirted Mom who calls out the hypocrites in her small town, is a neatly turned underdog song so feel-good that country audiences overlooked its mild undertone of ’60s rebellion.
On the other side, “I Love” and “Country Is” were unapologetic corn, a recitation of Norman Rockwell images like “little baby ducks” and “sitting on the back porch.” Hall always said he liked those songs because they connected to audiences. They did. They remain painful on a car radio.
He wrote some silly songs for fun, including “I Like Beer.” “Salute to a Switchblade” has a strange punchline, with the singer abandoning all his musical and literary ideals because a grizzled old cowpoke holds a knife to his throat. It does have a catchy hook, since the old cowpoke’s alternative to life being about “the truth” is that life is really about “faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, more money.”
That wasn’t Hall’s life. He spent eight years in the Army, a lot of years in radio, and a long serene retirement doing things like learning the violin, working with animal protection groups and teaching college.
He told interviewers he’d led a pretty comfortable and fortunate life. Happily, in Tom T. Hall’s case, that didn’t mean there was no story there.
