Tex Ritter called Tom T. Hall “The Storyteller,” and the moniker stuck because it was true. The singer-songwriter who passed away on Aug. 20, 2021, at the age of 85, told stories in his songs like the Grammy-winning CMA Single of the Year “Harper Valley PTA,” which catapulted newcomer Jeannie C. Riley to the top of both the pop and country singles charts in 1968, and Hall’s own No. 1 country hit “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine.”
“His songs are known for their richly detailed narrative structure and keen understanding of real people and their lives, and have brought to country music both thematic sophistication and social consciousness,” stated the Songwriters Hall of Fame, into which Hall was inducted in 2019.
Among his other 33 Top 20 singles – including seven No. 1s – that he recorded himself are “Ballad of Forty Dollars,” “Ravishing Ruby,” “Sneaky Snake,” “Your Man Loves You, Honey,” “A Week in a Country Jail,” “Country Is,” “I Like Beer,” “Faster Horses (the Cowboy and the Poet)” and “The Year Clayton Delaney Died.” Hall’s highest-charting hit on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 as an artist was “I Love,” which reached No. 12 in March 1974.
“That there is such a thing as a Tom T. Hall song, that was my greatest compliment,” Hall told journalist Jewly Hight in an interview for NPR.
Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Duane Eddy, Patty Griffin, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Dave Dudley and Gram Parsons are just a few of the artists who recorded Hall’s songs. “That’s How I Got to Memphis” became a No. 3 hit for Bobby Bare in 1970, and Alan Jackson made a No. 1 hit of “Little Bitty” in 1996.
“I never made judgments in my songs,” Hall told Hight referring to the characters he captured and the stories he told. “I had a lot of good characters, a lot of bad characters. But I never bragged on the good guys and I never condemned the losers. On another occasion Hall noted that he left it to the listener make judgements. “When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it,” he said.
Born May 25, 1936, in Olive Hill, Kentucky, Hall wrote his first song at nine with mentoring from local musician Clayton Delaney. He played bluegrass in his teens, performing on local radio in Morehead, Kentucky, where he wrote a jingle for a sponsor and was a DJ. Hall was a member of the Kentucky Travelers before enlisting in the Army in 1957 at age 21. While serving in Germany, he performed over the Armed Forces Radio Network. After his discharge he attended college on the GI Bill.
His son, blues musician, songwriter and singer Dean Todd Hall, was born in 1961 following a brief marriage to Opal Inez McKinney in Hall’s hometown. Dean did not discover his parentage until a teacher mentioned it to him during a school talent show when he was 10. He eventually toured with his famous father and others.
“These days, my father and I often hang out at his farm outside of Nashville,” Dean wrote in his blog a few years ago. “We mostly talk about poetry, philosophy, religion, or songwriting – you know: the easy stuff. Oh, and how we found all those roads eventually lead back home.”
After leaving Olive Hill in 1961, Hall became a DJ in Virginia. In 1964 a Nashville publisher placed a song he penned, “D.J. for a Day,” with Jimmy C. Newman, who took it to No. 9. That year, he moved to Nashville and landed a publishing contract with Newman and Jimmy Key writing songs for $50 a week. He had his first No. 1 with Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” in 1965.
In 1967 he was signed to Mercury Records. That’s when the “T.” was added to his name to distinguish him from artists with similar names. For himself and others he went on to write 12 No. 1 hit songs, with 26 more that reached the Top 10. As a singer, Hall landed seven Top10 albums on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, including reaching No. 1 on that chart with “The Rhymer and Other Five and Dimers” in June 1973.
In addition to songwriting, Hall was lauded for his authorship. He won the 1972 Grammy for Best Album Notes for his liner notes to “Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits.” His books include the autobiographical “The Storyteller’s Nashville” and the novels “The Laughing Man of Woodmont Cove,” “The Acts of Life,” “Spring Hill, Tennessee” and “What a Book!”
In 1994 Hall wrote a children’s album called “Songs of Fox Hollow,” which included a12-page illustrated book. In the intro he offered 11 items of advice for his young (and perhaps older) listeners. “Remember that someone, somewhere is always thinking of you and wants you to be happy,” Hall wrote. “People like you better than you think they do. You’re O.K.”
“How I Write Songs, Why You Can” was written to help aspiring songwriters. In the book he advised, “The important thing is to keep it close to the earth.”
Hall was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2002. He was named a BMI Icon in 2012. Across his career he garnered six Grammy nominations. Hall received the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004 with beloved wife and collaborator of 50 years, Dixie, whom he had met at the BMI Country Awards in 1964. The pair was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018, with Dixie inducted posthumously having passed away in 2015. Hall gave a series of performances at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum as the museum’s artist-in-residence in 2005 and was honored with induction in 2008.
“Tom T. Hall’s masterworks vary in plot, tone, and tempo, but they are bound by his ceaseless and unyielding empathy for the triumphs and losses of others,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young said after Hall’s passing. “He wrote without judgment or anger, offering a rhyming journalism of the heart that sets his compositions apart from any other writer. He was a storyteller, a philosopher, a whiskey maker, a novelist, a poet, a painter, a benefactor, a letter writer, a gift giver, a gentleman farmer and many more things.” At Hall’s 2019 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction in New York City, entertainer Jason Isbell sang Hall’s “Mama, Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)“ about a young man flying home from war without his legs, with a liquor bottle under his blanket and with understanding that his sweetheart most likely won’t love the changed man he is.
“I can see the stewardess make over me and ask ‘Were you afraid?’” Hall wrote in the song. ”I’ll say, ‘Why no, I’m Superman and couldn’t find the phone booth quite in time.’ A GI gets a lot of laughs if he remembers all the funny lines. Mama bake a pie, Daddy kill a chicken. Your son is coming home, 11:35 Wednesday night.”
“The simplest words that told the most complicated stories,” tweeted Isbell, adding, “Felt like Tom T. just caught the songs as they floated by, but I know he carved them out of rock.”
Hall and his wife were devoted animal activists. Memorials may be made in his name to the Williamson County Animal Shelter, 106 Claude Yates Dr., Franklin, TN 37064.
By Claudia Johnson