Tom T. Hall

Recording Artist · Active 1969–2021 · Olive Hill · Also a musician
Classic Country Singer-Songwriter

Tom T. Hall (1936–2021) was a singer and songwriter from Olive Hill, Kentucky, known as “the Storyteller,” who wrote Jeannie C. Riley’s 1968 country and pop number one “Harper Valley P.T.A.” and had seven number-one country hits with his own songs between 1970 and 1976. He played bluegrass as a teenager, made bluegrass records with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, and in his last decades wrote hundreds of bluegrass songs with his wife, Dixie Hall; the two were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.

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Thomas Hall was born on 25 May 1936 near Olive Hill, in a log cabin his grandfather had built, the fourth son of an ordained minister. He was playing guitar at four and wrote his first song, “Haven’t I Been Good to You,” at nine. A local musician, Lonnie Easterly, took him under his wing, and Hall later remembered him in “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died.”

As a teenager in the mid-1950s he played bass in his first band, the Kentucky Travelers, a bluegrass group that played local schools and the radio in Morehead, Kentucky, where he also wrote jingles for a sponsor and worked as a disc jockey. He joined the Army in 1957 and was stationed in Germany, where he sang on the Armed Forces Radio Network, often his own songs. Back home he enrolled at Roanoke College in Virginia on the G.I. Bill and worked as a disc jockey there, and the Nashville publisher Jimmy Key heard his songs. Key placed “D.J. for a Day” with Jimmy C. Newman, who had a Top Ten country hit with it in 1963–64, and in 1964 Hall moved to Nashville as a fifty-dollar-a-week writer for Newkeys Music, the company Key ran with Newman. Dave Dudley took his “Mad” into the Top Ten in 1964, and Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” gave him his first number one as a writer in 1965.

The producer Jerry Kennedy encouraged him to record his own songs, and Hall signed with Mercury Records in 1967, adding the middle initial “T.” to his name; his first single, “I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew,” came out that summer. The next year Jeannie C. Riley recorded his “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a song about a mother who stands up to small-town hypocrisy. It went to number one on the country and pop charts, won Riley the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year, and later inspired a film and a television series. Other singers kept taking his songs up the charts: Dudley had a number one with “The Pool Shark” in 1970, and Bobby Bare reached number four with “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn” in 1969 and number three with “(That’s) How I Got to Memphis” in 1970, a song later recorded by Solomon Burke, Rosanne Cash, Buddy Miller and Eric Church, among others.

His own records took off at the turn of the decade. After “Ballad of Forty Dollars,” which Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings also recorded, came his first number one, “A Week in a Country Jail” (1970), followed by “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” (1971), “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine” (1973), “I Love” and “Country Is” (1974), “I Care” (1975) and “Faster Horses (the Cowboy and the Poet)” (1976), all songs he wrote. “I Love” also reached number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1974, and his album The Rhymer and Other Five and Dimers topped the country albums chart in June 1973. Radio played many more of his own songs, among them “Me and Jesus,” “Ravishing Ruby,” “I Like Beer” and “Your Man Loves You, Honey,” and he wrote topical numbers such as “Watergate Blues.” He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1971, won the 1972 Grammy for Best Album Notes for his notes to Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits, and in 1974 made Songs of Fox Hollow (For Children of All Ages), with “Sneaky Snake.” He was elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978.

Bluegrass ran alongside the country hits. In the 1960s Jimmy Martin and Flatt & Scruggs recorded a number of his songs, Flatt & Scruggs a whole album of them about Bonnie and Clyde. In 1976 he made a bluegrass album for Mercury, The Magnificent Music Machine, mixing his own songs, among them “Bluegrass Festival in the Sky” and “Mama’s Got the Catfish Blues,” with “Fox on the Run,” John Prine’s “Paradise” and “Rank Stranger.” On “Molly and Tenbrooks,” cut on 13 July 1976 at U.S. Recording Studios in Nashville, Bill Monroe played mandolin, with Kenny Baker and Buddy Spicher on fiddles and Bobby Thompson on banjo. Mercury released “Fox on the Run” as a single, and his version took the song to many listeners outside bluegrass. In 1982 he and Earl Scruggs made The Storyteller and the Banjo Man for Columbia, which gave them two singles, “There Ain’t No Country Music on This Jukebox” and “Song of the South.”

From 1980 he hosted the syndicated television series Pop! Goes the Country, taking over from Ralph Emery. He was also a prose writer: How I Write Songs, Why You Can (1976), the memoir The Storyteller’s Nashville (1979), and the novels The Laughing Man of Woodmont Coves (1982), The Acts of Life (1986), Spring Hill, Tennessee (1990) and What a Book! (1996). His last Top Ten country hit was a 1984 cover of “P.S. I Love You.” After Song in a Seashell (1985) he stopped recording for ten years, returning in 1996 with Songs from Sopchoppy; Alan Jackson heard “Little Bitty” on it and had a number one with the song late that year. Mercury followed with Home Grown (1997), which opens with “Bill Monroe for Breakfast.”

His wife, Dixie Hall, born Iris Lawrence in England in 1934, was a songwriter herself; they met at a BMI awards banquet, where she had come with Mother Maybelle Carter and was accepting an award for co-writing Dave Dudley’s 1965 hit “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun,” and they married in 1968. After Tom T. retired from performing in the 1990s, the two turned to writing bluegrass songs together, hundreds of them, recorded over the next fifteen years and more by Don Rigsby, James King, Alecia Nugent and many others. They ran music publishing companies and a record label from their farm outside Nashville, and built a studio in Franklin, Tennessee, after he had taken a course in audio engineering; he engineered its first recordings himself, and the Halls never charged the artists who recorded there. The International Bluegrass Music Association gave them a Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004. In 2005 he was artist-in-residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and in 2007 Blue Circle issued Tom T. Hall Sings Miss Dixie & Tom T., an album of their songs with Kristin Scott Benson on banjo, Wayne Benson on mandolin, Glen Duncan on fiddle and Mike Bub on bass. Earl Scruggs played banjo on “One of Those Days (When I Miss Lester Flatt),” and Jimmy Martin joined him on “Jimmy Martin’s Life Story.”

Dixie Hall died in 2015. In 2018 the couple were named to the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame at Bean Blossom, Indiana, and inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 27 September, Dixie posthumously. Tom T. Hall died at his home in Franklin on 20 August 2021, aged 85.

  • 1972 Grammy, Best Album Notes, Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits
  • 1978 Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
  • 2002 Kentucky Music Hall of Fame
  • 2004 IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award (with Dixie Hall)
  • 2008 Country Music Hall of Fame
  • 2012 BMI Icon
  • 2018 Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame and International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame (both with Dixie Hall)
  • 2019 Songwriters Hall of Fame

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