Videos by American Songwriter
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It wasn’t just “write what you know.”
“I feel that it is important to tell you that I know far more than my songs have said,” Hall wrote in his memoir.
He didn’t mean that as a brag about accumulated knowledge. He knows humility is the first virtue. Hall meant that as a lesson: Don’t just write what you know. Write less than you know. Know more than you write. Wonder and study and gather, then whittle to the essence.
Hall whittled to the essence of racism. His only song of overt judgement was called “The Man Who Hated Freckles.” It was written at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was delivered to a supposedly conservative, ill-educated country music audience. But Hall wasn’t a songwriter who wrote for an audience. He was a person who wrote to other people.
“Well, he’d see a kid with freckles and he’d cuss, said ‘Because of them my children have to bus/ We wouldn’t have the trouble we have seen, if it wasn’t for that Martin Luther Queen,” he wrote and sang.
“The Man Who Hated Freckles” was a non-absurdist’s song about absurdity, with “freckles” taking the place of a more sinister slur. It was a cry for help, and a howl of admonition. It ended, “The man who hated freckles may be sick, but as far as I’m concerned he was a stupid son of a …”
“If we didn’t have people of color and culture, we would ostracize people with freckles,” he says. “The nature of people is to find someone different and blame them for being different, to cast aspersion on their character and intentions. I was taught as a young man that we’d get over that, or maybe I just kind of believed that if I lived a long life, the world would come to its senses and we’d quit killing each other and get over whatever this racism thing is. But we didn’t.”
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There was a time, Tom T. Hall says, when people worried about him.
“A friend of mine said once, ‘Tom T., people in Nashville think you’re crazy. You don’t try to fit in, you don’t go to the right places, and some people are a little bit afraid of you.’ Hey, if you can’t get respect, take fear, which is, actually, a form of respect.
“Look, poets are unmanageable. I said, ‘What’s wrong with me is my greatest asset.’ What creative people do is to bring original things into the world. It’s a dangerous business, and you can’t have both sanity and creativity. They don’t run around together.”
And so these days, Hall cedes creativity in exchange for sanity. He is, he says, done, with nothing left to prove. He has been written about as the greatest country songwriter since Hank Williams. Country Music Hall of Famer Bobby Bare calls him the single best storytelling songwriter we’ve known. President Jimmy Carter spoke of him as the singular voice of a common American conscience. He is retired from songwriting.
But, once he got done with his Little Darlin’ era, he was not really a songwriter at all. After all, songwriters are not good songwriters. People are good songwriters.
Others work on being pithy, elliptical, and clever. Tom T. Hall wanted to be a person, not a great man. But, ultimately, the work bestowed greatness upon him. He rose from hard and isolated Kentucky poverty and found a place in the pantheon. And every time he found comfort and satisfaction in all of that, he stuck a tennis shoe on top of his head until the feeling went away. Buy the Jan/Feb 2016 “Legends Issue”
