The Profile: Tom T. Hall
By Will Jordan
He’s called the “Storyteller,” but Tom T. Hall’s most famous stories are sung rather than spoken. Country stars like Bobby Bare, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings have all cut best-selling songs by this legendary Williamson Countian.
And while Hall says he retired from the music business 12 years ago, his wife Dixie, also a successful songwriter, quickly corrects him: “You retired the day you were born, Tom T.,” she teases.
“Well, that’s basically true,” he concedes.
Hall has a gentle countenance and a quick sense of humor. His face is lined and sun-tanned, his hair cropped short and bleach-white, and his eyes ice-blue and piercing. He smiles often. His stories are genuine, long and vivid; and he doesn’t shy from the truth, instead he takes pride in his humble beginnings and lengthy career.
Blue hill roots
Born in 1936 in Olive Hill, Ky., the bluegrass picker and country balladeer never lost touch with his blue hill roots, which run deep in his often comic, narrative songwriting and picking style.
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a songwriter,” Hall says. “Maybe it was a reincarnation thing or a gift.” Hall’s father, a brick-laying Baptist preacher, gave him his first guitar at age eight; and by the time he was nine, he had written his first song.
“When I was visiting a married couple, they got into a disagreement, hollering at each other like a country music song. I heard the husband say, ‘Well, haven’t I been good to you?’” he recalls. “So I wrote a song called, ‘Haven’t I Been Good to You’ and pretended that it was a real song I had heard on the radio. I’ll be darned if people didn’t like it.”
The budding storyteller’s first encounters with the bluegrass music of Flatt and Scruggs and Bill Monroe formed the foundation of his style. As a teenager, he formed his first band, the Kentucky Travelers.
“My voice was too deep for me to be lead singer, but I would sing the deep, ‘Ole Lordy’ parts,” he says.
After high school, Hall honed his songwriting skills in Germany, where he was stationed during a stint in the Army. Later, he worked as a DJ for various radio stations, and in 1963, he got his first cut as a songwriter when Jimmy C. Newman recorded his song “DJ for a Day.” Hall, who was living in Roanoke, Va. at the time, moved to Nashville the following New Year’s Day.
Success without compromise
“I think it was three or four days before Nashville sobered up and would talk to me or even knew I was in town,” he laughs. “It was a seriously boozing town back then.”
Instead of reinventing himself to adapt to the “Nashville sound,” he remembered an adage he learned while studying journalism in Roanoke: “Write about what you know.”
“I couldn’t do what Nashville was doing at the time, so I wrote about things that were more familiar to me,” he explains. It was a strategy that paid off, with hits like “A Week in a Country Jail,” “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine,” “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” “I Like Beer” and “Faster Horses.” His biggest hit, “Harper Valley PTA,” – recorded in 1968 by Jeannie C. Riley, sold over six million copies and won a Grammy and CMA award.
Hall is proud of the fact that he’s never compromised his original sound.
“I never used electricity in any of my albums. They were always acoustic,” he says. “I never had rhinestones, either. I just couldn’t write those Nashville ‘Little Darling’ country songs. It wasn’t that I didn’t like that kind of music. It just wasn’t my style.”
Nashville producer Jerry Kennedy recognized the importance of keeping Hall’s sound raw and put Tom T. Hall with artists who were right for the sound.
He toured as a sideman for country singer Bobby Bare (playing nearly every instrument), but the road never had a huge pull on Hall.
“I never did have a romance with the road,” he says. “It’s often said that there are several addictions that come along with this business – drugs or alcohol, sex, greed – but you can also get addicted to applause. That’s the worst one of all. I was never hooked on any of them.” Hall says he worked the road as a business, but treated it as a summer or weekend job, taking winters off.
“I never worked that hard,” he says. “When I’d get home, I’d go to the farm and go fishing and hunting.”
A simpler life
That love for the rural life is apparent in the Halls’ home. Down a long gravel drive that winds past horse barns, under an enormous arbor and into a courtyard is Fox Hollow plantation. In 1972, the Halls carved their home out of 67 picturesque acres of woods, rolling hills and two lakes. They immersed themselves in the Franklin and Nashville communities, etching out a legacy as two of the most prolific songwriters Nashville has ever known.
Located in a guesthouse is the Halls’ recording studio and publishing house, its walls are filled with photographs, awards and other memorabilia.
“We spend most of our time over here,” Tom T. Hall says. “It’s like being isolated from the rest of the world.”
While Hall’s insistence on going his own way has cost him opportunities, including a gig as the banjo player in the thriller Deliverance, he’s satisfied that he never subscribed to the politics of the music business.
“If I didn’t want to do something, I just wouldn’t do it. That pissed off a lot of people,” he says. “I just couldn’t stand around smiling all the time for people. I could have made a lot more money and created the illusion of a bigger act if I had an ego.”
“That’s for people who are unsure of themselves,” Dixie chimes in. Hall met Dixie at a BMI dinner where both were receiving songwriting honors, and the two fell for each other almost immediately.
“She was getting an award for ‘Truck Driving Son-of-a Gun,’ and I had the B side of that record. She’s never let me live that one down,” he says, laughing.
Now 73, Hall may be retired as a performer but still writes songs nearly every day with Dixie.
“We’ve probably written 200 songs over the last ten years or so,” he says.
They travel the blue highways with a mandolin and a tape recorder, stopping in little cafes, churchyards and country stores, trolling for material. Dixie says it’s always a thrill to hear their songs over the airwaves.
“It’s a lot of fun,” she says. “It’s like watching puppies being born.”
As the Halls chat inside their studio house, a Basset hound named Local Fleur (don’t ask) howls outside, and an enormous peacock flutters up to a feeder outside the window.
Where cows once grazed, peacocks, raccoons, squirrels and wild turkeys now roam the property fearlessly.
Though the peacocks don’t know it, the hand that feeds them belongs to one of Middle Tennessee’s genuine stars, whose most recent honor was his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame last year.
“It was really awesome, but it kind of freaked me out,” Hall says. “It was truly a horrible experience having to deal with all of that press and everything, but it was a great honor.
If they put anyone else into the Hall of Fame over 65, they should just put it in the mail,” he jokes. “It was kind of like going to my own funeral.”
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