Tom T. Hall: The Person Comes First

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Videos by American Songwriter

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Tossed and turned the night before in some old motel

Subconsciously recalling some old sinful thing I’d done

My buddy drove the car and those big coal trucks shook us up

As we drove on into Hyden in the early morning sun

That’s the beginning of “Trip To Hyden,” another Tom T. Hall song with no chorus, and no mention of the title in the lyrics.

In songs, movies, short stories, and novels, writers know that the introduction of a plot point necessitates the resolution of a plot point. Listeners, viewers, and readers want to know what happens. Hall knows about literary convention, having spent years touring around in a consortium called “The Brotherhood,” with close bookworm friends like Roots author Alex Haley and renowned poet (and daddy of Lucinda) Miller Williams.

So what was the sinful thing that caused the night’s lost sleep? “Trip To Hyden” never says.

“My first line is always something I know to be completely true,” Hall says. “And it is supposed to let the listener in on something. In ‘Trip To Hyden,’ they know immediately that the guy singing to them is a traveler, and that he’s not a perfect person. Then they know he’s a passenger in a car, in coal country. There’s a scene that’s being set there, but it’s set because it’s something that happened.”

Start with something — an image, an emotion — that’s completely true … that’s a central lesson in American roots music lyric-writing. It doesn’t have to be followed, but it should be understood. Emmylou Harris wrote, “I don’t want to hear a love song/ I got on this airplane just to fly.” Guy Clark wrote, “I’d play the ‘Red River Valley,’ and he’d sit in the kitchen and cry.”

Most people haven’t heard “Trip To Hyden.” If they’ve heard Tom T. Hall’s songs, they’ve heard “(Old Dogs, Children And) Watermelon Wine,” or a children’s song he wrote called “I Love,” or the one about his childhood hero, “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” or Jeannie C. Riley’s recording of his “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Maybe they’ve heard Alan Jackson singing “Little Bitty.” Those were all #1 hit singles. But Tom T. Hall was an album artist before most others in country music thought that way. He released 19 albums in the first ten years of his recording career, and he wrote the vast majority of the songs on those albums.

So, that’s two albums a year, with a rough average of 12 songs per album, and most of those songs coming from his pen (or his typewriter ribbon). Each album held only a single or two, so much of Hall’s output existed outside of what anyone heard on the radio.

Hall wasn’t one to record a couple of commercially viable singles and then pad his albums with filler. The vast majority of his greatest work exists below the radar, and is only available now on foreign reissues. He’s a Country Music Hall of Famer because of the singles. He’s an American Songwriter Legends issue cover subject because of the albums.

Those albums hold songs like “Million Miles To The City,” where Olive Hill kids dismiss an adult’s account of the nearest city: “‘Why, the buildings are taller than oak trees,’ but we knew better than that/ Ain’t nobody could climb that high, the cities were wide and flat.”

Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers points to “Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken),” where a wounded soldier returning from war ponders his trifling former girlfriend: “I know she’ll come and see me, but I’ll bet she never once looks at my legs/ No, she’ll talk about the weather, and the dress she wore at the July fourth parade.”

At every concert, Buddy Miller delivers a Tom T. Hall ballad. Miller says it centers him. It was never a single for Hall. It begins, “If you love somebody enough, you’ll follow wherever they go/ That’s how I got to Memphis.” Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, George Jones, Flatt & Scruggs, John Prine, Jim Lauderdale, and hundreds of others have recorded Hall-penned songs that Tom T. never released as singles.

As for “Trip to Hyden,” the narrator and his driver head to the site of a Kentucky mining disaster, where efforts were being made to aid the victims’ families. They encounter an old man who says of the mining explosion, “It was just like being inside of a shotgun.” It ends with this:

Well, I guess the old man thought we were reporters

He kept reminding me of how his simple name was spelled

Some lady said, “They worth more money now then when they’s a’living”

And I’ll leave it there, ‘cause I suppose she told it pretty well

A songwriter writes in enriched language, about miners who toiled and coughed and ached, for the comfort of those who lived above their station. A songwriter sits in judgement of society. A songwriter might be prone to smug poetry.

A person writes the words of a woman who says to him, “They worth more money now then when they’s a’living.”

A person writes, “I’ll leave it there, ‘cause I suppose she told it pretty well.”

Tom T Hall

Tom T. Hall, Known as ‘The Storyteller,’ Dies at 85