Ballad Of Forty Dollars And His Other Great Songs

Ballad of Forty Dollars and His Other Great Songs (Mercury Records, 1968) is the debut album from Tom T. Hall, the Olive Hill, Kentucky singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose gift for precise character studies and working-class narratives would earn him the nickname "The Storyteller." Hall sings and plays guitar throughout; Nashville session musicians provide the Mercury studio production beneath. The title track — a mordant first-person account of a gravedigger at the funeral of a man who owed him money — reached number four on the Billboard country chart in 1968 and established Hall as one of Nashville's most distinctive voices. The album's remaining songs extend the quality of observed particularity that made Hall's writing one of the defining narrative signatures of the late-1960s Nashville country tradition.