Singer-songwriter, bard Hall, 85, dies
Hall of Famer known as storyteller
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tom T. Hall, the singer-songwriter who composed “Harper Valley P.T.A.” and sang about life’s simple joys as country music’s consummate blue-collar bard, has died. He was 85.
His son, Dean Hall, confirmed the musician’s death Friday at his home in Franklin, Tenn. Known as “The Storyteller” for his unadorned yet incisive lyrics, Hall composed hundreds of songs.
Along with such contemporaries as Kris Kristofferson, John Hartford and Mickey Newbury, Hall helped usher in a literary era of country music in the early 1970s, with songs that were political like “Watergate Blues” and “The Monkey That Became President,” personal like “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” and philosophical like “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine.”
“In all my writing, I’ve never made judgments,” he said in 1986. “I think that’s my secret. I’m a witness. I just watch everything and don’t decide if it’s good or bad.”
Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell performed Hall’s song “Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken)” when Hall was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
“The simplest words that told the most complicated stories. Felt like Tom T. just caught the songs as they floated by, but I know he carved them out of rock,” Isbell tweeted Friday.
Hall started playing guitar at age 4 and wrote his first song by the time he was 9. He settled in Nashville in 1964 and first established himself as a songwriter making $50 a week. He wrote songs for Jimmy C. Newman, Dave Dudley and Johnny Wright.
Hall’s breakthrough was writing “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a 1968 international hit about small-town hypocrisy recorded by Jeannie C. Riley. The song about a mother telling a group to mind their own business was witty, feisty and became a No. 1 hit. It sold millions of copies, and Riley won a Grammy for best female country vocal performance and an award for single of the year from the Country Music Association. The story was so popular that it spawned a movie of the same name and a television series.
“Suddenly, it was the talk of the country,” Hall told The Associated Press in 1986. “It became a catch phrase. You’d flip the radio dial and hear it four or five times in 10 minutes. It was the most awesome time of my life; I caused all this stir.”
His own singing career took off after that song and he had a string of hits with “Ballad of Forty Dollars” (also recorded by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings), his first career No. 1 hit “A Week in a Country Jail,” and “Homecoming” in the late 1960s.
Throughout the ’70s, Hall became one of Nashville’s biggest singer-songwriters, with multiple hit songs including “I Love,” “Country Is,” “I Care,” “I Like Beer” and “Faster Horses (The Cowboy and The Poet.)” He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978.
“Tom T. Hall’s masterworks vary in plot, tone and tempo, but they are bound by his ceaseless and unyielding empathy for the triumphs and losses of others,” Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement.