Tom T. Hall
Mercury-Nashville Biography 10/95
Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Tom T. Hall stands alone among America's troubadours.
No other composer has explored the poetry of everyday life as deeply. None of his peers have created as vivid a cast of characters. No songwriter before or since has worked within the country idiom to fashion as consistent a body of work with such compassion, insight and narrative strength. He remains, simply, the ultimate musical "Storyteller".
Through a 30-plus album career, Tom T. Hall has scored more than 50 chart hits, won Grammy and CMA awards, become a Grand Old Opry member, has more than 20 top-10 successes, been named Songwriter of the Year and been called "the poet laureate of country music". He has also published six books, including a novel, a short-story collection and an autobiography.
Classics such as "Old Dogs, Children And Watermelon Wine", "I Love", "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died" and "Homecoming" will remain hallmarks of great country songwriting as long as there's a man with a guitar. He has created a solid body of children's music, some notable political satire pieces and some of Nashville's rowdiest beer-drinking anthems. His "Harper Valley P.T.A." sold six million singles, inspired a movie and a TV series, crossed over to become a No. 1 pop hit and became a nationwide sensation.
Hall has been almost as potent as an interpreter. His voice immor-talized the bluegrass standard "Fox On The Run", revived chestnuts like "It's All In The Game" and "P.S. I Love You" and originated such country staples as "Song of the South" and "Old Five And Dimers Like Me".
He was a national TV celebrity and a notable commercial spokesman of the 1980s. In the 1990s he has become known for his charitable activities, creative-writing workshops and one-man shows. And through it all he has remained a man of the soil.
Tom T. Hall was born on May 25, 1936 in a log cabin behind his grandfather's house at Tick Ridge, seven miles from Olive Hill, Ky. His father, Virgil, was a brick-plant worker and preacher. The family was desperately poor, but the boy's early years seem to have been fairly carefree. Even then he was a daydreamer who loved to wander in the mountains.
Hall picked up the guitar at age 4. He started to write a novel when he was 8. He wrote his first song when he was 9. By the time he was 13, young Tom could play and sing all the country favorites of the day. And that is approximately when his youth ended. His mother, Della, died of cancer that year, as did his musical hero, Floyd Carter, later immortalized as "Clayton Delaney". After his father was shot and wounded in a hunting accident, Tom T. Hall dropped out of school. He was 15.
The boy went to work in a garment factory, a sweat shop. He also joined a local bluegrass band called The Kentucky Travelers and began appearing on WMOR radio in Morehead, Ky. When his fellow musicians were drafted for the Korean War, Hall remained at the station as a DJ.
He signed up for a three-year hitch in the army in 1957. While stationed in Germany, Hall earned his high school diploma, performed in a servicemen's country music band and began writing songs to entertain his fellow G.I.'s. Back home, he continued to compose, briefly joined an Indiana band called The Technicians, bought a grocery store, attended Roanoke College in Virginia on the G.I. Bill and returned to DJ work with jobs at seven different stations in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. During a 1962 broadcasting stint in Ronceverte, W.Va., Hall's coworkers began encouraging him to become a songwriting professional.
An acquaintance took a tape to Newkeys Music, which signed him immediately as a staff songwriter. Grand Old Opry star Jimmy C. Newman sang Hall's "DJ For A Day" into the top-10 in late 1963. On January 1, 1964, Tom T. Hall moved to Nashville with $46 and a guitar.
Within months of his arrival, Dave Dudley was on the charts with Hall's "Mad" (1964) and Newman encored with "Artificial Rose" (1965). In 1965 Dudley scored with "What We're Fighting For" and Johnny Wright hit No. 1 with "Hello Vietnam". The Statler Brothers recorded "Billy Christian" (1965) and the new tunesmith struck again with the top-10 successes of "Back Pocket Money" (Jimmy C. Newman, 1966) and "If I Ever Fall In Love" (Faron Young, 1970). Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and dozens of others subsequently recorded Hall's creations.
In 1967 singer Margie Singleton asked Hall to write her a song in the manner of Bobbie Gentry's big hit "Ode To Billie Jo". He delved into his boyhood memories and came up with "Harper Valley P.T.A.", a song of small town hypocrisy. But Singleton was out on tour when the song was finished, so Hall pitched to other acts. In the summer of 1968 Jeannie C. Riley recorded it in Columbia's studio on Music Row.
The session was on Friday night. By Saturday afternoon, radio stations were playing the tape. The records were in the mail the following Wednesday. Before the week was out Nashville's pressing plants were shipping singles to stores as fast as they could make them. By the end of the summer, Jeannie C. and Tom T. were both household names.
Hall has never recorded it or any of the other tunes he wrote for others.
But in 1967 he began to commit to disc a stunning body of work, hundreds of songs fashioned for his own voice. Guitarist/producer Jerry Kennedy urged him to sign with Mercury, believing that his delivery could sell records. Kennedy's hunch was right; Hall's vocal style and phrasing are perfectly tuned to his direct, to-the-point lyrics. Hall's performances made him a constant presence on the popular charts of 1967-1987.
It was when he became a recording artist that Hall added the initial "T" to his name to make it catchier. During a UNICEF benefit tour of Australia, cowboy star Tex Ritter began referring to him as "The Storyteller," pronouncing it with a long "O" in his booming, stentorian voice. The band started mimicking Tex's delivery. The nickname stuck.
As he progressed as a singer-songwriter, Hall devised a particular method for gathering new inspiration--he just got in his car and went. He wandered into small Southern towns and soaked up the atmo-sphere, eating in cafes and meeting ordinary citizens--all the while listening to the way they talked and what they talked about. A 1970 album was aptly titled I Witness Life. He described his wanderings in the title of his 1971 collection, In Search Of A Song. A season spent beachcombing in 1985 yielded Song In A Seashell. He embraced his moniker and described his talent by naming his 1972 collection, simply, The Storyteller.
But there is still more to his art. Hall demonstrated remarkable facility for children's music with his landmark kiddie LPs released in 1974 and 1988. He paid homage to bluegrass with 1976's The Magnificent Music Machine. He worked within the traditional love-song idiom on 1977's About Love. He describes himself as a loner in a world of show business back-slapping, artifice and fakery: "I get off the stage and off the bus and get home, and when I wake up, I was just who I was in the army, who I was as a kid. I want to get out in the woods and hunt or fish, or work in the shop on some furniture. I've always been content to be me, not a celebrity.
"I was never a superstar anyway, never the rage."
Yet his natural, relaxed me-to-you style made him the national TV star of Pop Goes the Country for three seasons(1980-83), the longtime commercial spokesman for Tyson Chicken and Chevy Trucks, a guest on virtually every variety and talk show, and a 1980 inductee into the hallowed Opry cast.
And he has forged some remarkable musical bonds. Hall's disc collaborators have included Johnny Cash, Patti Page, Earl Scruggs, Dave Dudley and Bill Monroe. He discovered country star Johnny Rodriguez and promoted the songwriting career of Billy Joe Shaver. When Mercury Records announced The Essential Tom T. Hall as a 20th anniversary double LP in 1988, President Jimmy Carter, authors Kurt Vonnegut and Will Campbell, Country Music Hall of Famers George Jones and Johnny Cash, broadcaster Ralph Emery, baseball's Johnny Bench, football's Darrell Royal and a host of others penned apprecia-tive testimonials.
Tom T. Hall continues to compose today. He is currently working on material for a new album. He also still works on his fiction, which is attracting increasing critical attention. In addition, Mercury Records is saluting his distinguished legacy with a boxed set of CDs titled Tom T. Hall: Storyteller, Poet, Philosopher; a reissue of his romantic material titled Loves Lost and Found and a repackaging of his popular children's songs.
"I don't know any more about songwriting than I did when I was down on the street," he maintains humbly. "All I know is just don't judge anybody. God made everybody different.
"You have to be careful not to make judgments. And be honest. That's the main thing. Just tell the tale."