{"id":6777,"date":"2021-09-24T07:38:39","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T06:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=6777"},"modified":"2021-09-24T07:38:40","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T06:38:40","slug":"tom-t-hall-keeper-of-all-the-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/09\/24\/tom-t-hall-keeper-of-all-the-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"TOM T HALL: Keeper Of All The Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TOM T HALL: Keeper Of All The Stories<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick pays attention to Geoffrey Himes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Tom T Hall himself, who died Friday 20th<\/sup> August at age 85, was a deceptively simple man\u00b4,<\/em> says \u00b4Mr. Himes, for Paste on-line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4He looked like a banker and sang in the plainest of baritones. But he had 30 top-20 country singles, including six #1\u2019s, and he wrote nearly as many hits for other artists. The only explanation for this paradox is the power of his song-writing. His songs evoked working-class conversations so suggestively that the listener could imagine the setting, the backstory and the future resolution\u2014all of which the song-writer left undefined so the audience could fill out the story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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His influence spread beyond the country-music industry where he spent most of his career. Just look at the artists who have recorded That\u2019s How I Got to Memphis. Bobby Bare had a #3 country hit with it in 1970, and Deryl Dodd had a #36 hit with it in 1996. But it became a favourite of Americana artists and was also recorded by Rosanne Cash, Buddy Miller, the Avett Brothers, Eric Church (left)<\/strong>, Charley Crockett, Lee Hazelwood, Kelly Willis, Scott Walker, Joe Pernice and Solomon Burke. How could they resist a song filled with so much longing?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much is made of Hall\u2019s childhood in the small, Appalachian town of Olive Hill, Kentucky, but it was his education at Roanoke College on the G.I. Bill that enabled him to turn that community into literature. He had been reading Sinclair Lewis\u2019 novels, and he longed to write something similar about the gap between how his neighbours thought of themselves and how they actually acted. But rather than writing a book, he wrote a song: Harper Valley, P.T.A., a #1 hit for Jeannie Riley on both the country and pop charts in 1968 before inspiring a movie and a TV series.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on a memory from Olive Hill, the clever lyrics tell the story of a \u201cwidowed wife\u201d whose teenage daughter brings a note from the high school P.T.A. complaining that her mother is wearing short skirts, drinking in public and dating wild men. The mother marches right down to the school, barges into a P.T.A. meeting and reads them the riot act, pointing out their own not-so-secret problems with alcohol and adultery. It\u2019s a classic tale of turning the tables on hypocritical moralists. In a final twist, it\u2019s revealed that the song is being sung years later by the daughter herself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a kid,<\/em><\/strong> Hall told me in 2007, I had this epiphany that anything that could happen anywhere could happen in Olive Hill. We had aristocracy; we had poor and the middle. We had politicians; we had gangsters. We had family feuds. People lived and died. That\u2019s where \u2018Harper Valley P.T.A.\u2019 came from. I knew if I wrote about a flower in a field near Olive Hill, I was writing about every flower in the world. The same was true if I was writing about people. I took that and then read all the great books and learned all the great concepts, and the songs came out.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Harper Valley PTA is a song so good they made a movie out of it,\u00b4 Mary Gauthier (right)<\/strong> told me that same year<\/em>. \u00b4It captures a certain place at a certain time perfectly by the use of microscopic details. He\u2019s like a journalist the way he describes a scene. He\u2019s one of the greatest story songwriters of all time. He takes me where he wants me to go and makes me feel it. It\u2019s a journalistic approach\u2014just tell the story and let the listener decide. Don\u2019t moralize about it. He was so good at that.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hall moved to Nashville at age 27 after Jimmy C. Newman had a hit in 1963 with one of Hall\u2019s songs, DJ for a Day. Even though he wrote the pro-war song, Hello Vietnam, for Johnny Wright in 1965, Hall was more liberal than most in the Nashville. He could put a fiercely independent woman at the centre of Harper Valley P.T.A.; he could write an anti-lynching song like Dew and an iconoclastic song such as The Monkey That Became President. (Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine may be a tribute to those three things, but it\u2019s also a condemnation of pretty much everything else. No wonder John Prine recorded it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Hall bequeathed to the Americana movement that so admired him was a finely honed sense of irony. Homecoming, for example, is sung by an ambitious musician who\u2019s back in his hometown after a long spell away. But it\u2019s not the triumphant return you might expect; the narrator apologizes for missing his mama\u2019s funeral, for not writing and for looking like a ghost. It\u2019s so skillfully done that the listener can figure out all the things left unsaid.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4On Homecoming\u00b4, Gauthier points out<\/em>, \u00b4he doesn\u2019t say if the musician telling the story has made a great choice or a horrible one. Which is great. I don\u2019t want you to tell me how to feel. I can decide how to feel. Just tell me the story so I can visualize it. Maybe some people want the conclusion provided for them, but those aren\u2019t the fans I\u2019m looking for. That\u2019s not the kind of listener I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, Pamela Brown is sung by a man remembering the woman he once wanted to marry. But instead of what you\u2019d expect, the narrator is thanking her for turning down his marriage proposal. If she\u2019d accepted, he\u2019d \u201cprobably be driving kids to school\u201d rather than having adventures in dozens of cities, here and overseas. Ravishing Ruby describes a gorgeous truck-stop waitress, but Hall looks inside her head and discovers she\u2019s not paying attention to all her flirtatious customers. She\u2019s still pining for the father who abandoned her as a teenager.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom T Hall<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4The music business is a funny business\u00b4, Hall told me. \u201cDespite all the organizing and planning, there\u2019s an element that can\u2019t be planned\u2014and that\u2019s the creativity. You have to be in the right mental zone to write a good song. Humility is required. Sometimes I\u2019d put a sneaker on my head, and I\u2019d say, \u2018This is the most ridiculous thing in the world.\u2019 You have to accept both the sublime and the ridiculous all at once to get in the zone. But once you\u2019re in there, all the trivia disappears, and the song just unfolds.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When Hall first came to Nashville, he fell in with a crowd of young, obscure writers who had a similar taste for the sublime and the ridiculous: Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and Hank Cochran. They\u2019d hang out at Tootsie\u2019s Lounge, right behind the Ryman Auditorium, and beg Grand Ole Opry performers to record their latest efforts. But because they were writing for each other more than Music Row, they developed a subtlety and richness of language that differentiated them from the usual country-radio fare.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hall himself joked, \u201cSomeone once said, \u2018Tom T. and Kris are the only two men in Nashville who can describe Dolly Parton without using their hands.\u2019 We\u2019d all sit around and drink beer and play our songs for each other\u2014and that\u2019s how we got better. A lot of writers in town made a career out \u2018Little Darlin\u2019\u2019 songs: \u2018I Miss You, Little Darlin\u2019 #1,\u2019 \u201cI Miss You, Little Darlin\u2019 #2\u2019 and so on. But Roger, Kris and I couldn\u2019t write that kind of song; we were writing outside of that, and it pissed off a lot of producers, because they wanted a \u2018Little Darlin\u2019\u2019 song. We tried; we wrote hundreds of them. But in our spare time, we also wrote \u2018Homecoming,\u2019 \u2018Dang Me\u2019 and \u2018Sunday Morning Coming Down.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1968, when Hall married Iris Lawrence, an English songwriter known to most the world as \u201cMiss Dixie,\u201d she became his artistic conscience is much the same way as Kristofferson and Miller. And when Tom T. stopped having hits in the mid-1980s, he more or less retired.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d watched baseball players get pushed out of the major leagues,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey\u2019d go to Japan for three years and then hobble home. I\u2019d seen singers who sold a lot of records fall off the charts. They\u2019d spend all their money trying to have another hit. After they\u2019d spent all the money they\u2019d made, they\u2019d have nothing left and end up playing the county fairs. I didn\u2019t want that to happen to me, so I planned my retirement. I even cultivated some hobbies: playing golf, raising vegetables, fishing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he liked more than anything, though, was writing country songs. \u201cI can\u2019t quit that,\u201d he says helplessly; \u201cit\u2019s just who I am.\u201d But what could he do with those songs once he\u2019d written them? Who\u2019d record his songs without trying to change them to make radio happy or turning them into complicated business deals? Bluegrass singers would.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Soon he was busy writing new songs, often with his wife, for string bands. More than 200 of his songs were recorded by such bluegrass notables as Charlie Sizemore, Don Rigsby, Doyle Lawson, Dave Evans and two sons of bluegrass legends, James Monroe and Ralph Stanley II. Mr. Hall, who had always regarded Bill Monroe as \u201con a par with Mozart and Chopin,\u201d had stumbled into a second career, and put his retirement on hold. He even released a new bluegrass album of his own.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dixie Hall died in 2015, and Tom T. died on Friday. Together with his buddies Nelson, Kristofferson and Miller, Hall helped revolutionize country songwriting. And the reverberations of that earthquake are still felt in Americana today.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI like songwriters such as Dylan, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle and Tom T. Hall,\u201d Gauthier concludes, \u201cbecause they ask you to participate. And leaving room for the listener to participate is not the same as being vague. If it\u2019s vague it doesn\u2019t mean anything; it\u2019s just clever. I hate clever; it\u2019s so pleased with itself. The difference between vagueness and participation is emotion\u2014not the emotion in the writer but the emotion in the listener.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prime source for this article was a piece written by Geoffrey Himes for Paste On-Line.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our occasional re-postings Sidetracks And Detours are confident that we are not only sharing with our readers excellent articles written by experts but are also pointing to informed and informative sites readers will re-visit time and again. Of course, we feel sure our readers will return to our daily not-for-profit blog, knowing that we seek to provide core original material whilst sometimes spotlighting the best pieces from elsewhere, as we engage with genres and practitioners along all the sidetracks & detours we take.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom T Hall had 30 top-20 country singles, including six #1\u2019s, and he wrote nearly as many hits for other artists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6784,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777\/revisions\/6784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}