Tom T. Hall
Best known for
Songwriter
Lead Vocals
Guitar
Tom T. Hall was one of the most influential songwriters in American country music, a narrative craftsman whose plainspoken, detail-rich songs earned him the nickname “the Storyteller.” He wrote a dozen number-one hits and the international pop smash “Harper Valley PTA,” and in his later years he and his wife Dixie became devoted patrons of bluegrass, writing hundreds of songs for the genre’s artists from their Fox Hollow farm.
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- Born May 25, 1936 on Tick Ridge, some seven miles south of Olive Hill in eastern Kentucky, he was one of eight children of a brick-plant worker and part-time preacher. He wrote his first song at nine and drew early guidance from an older local musician he would later immortalize in song.
- As a teenager he formed a string band, the Kentucky Travelers, that played before movies for a traveling theater; after the group disbanded he worked as a radio DJ before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1957 and serving in Germany, where he continued writing and performing.
- His songwriting break came in 1963 when Jimmy C. Newman recorded his “DJ for a Day.” In 1964 he moved to Nashville and took a job as a fifty-dollar-a-week staff writer for Newkeys Music, sharpening the observational, short-story style that would define him.
- In 1968 Jeannie C. Riley recorded his “Harper Valley PTA,” a sly small-town morality tale that topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and the country chart, sold more than six million copies, and won a Grammy and a CMA award — establishing Hall as a marquee songwriter.
- He launched his own recording career on Mercury Records, scoring his first solo hit with “Ballad of Forty Dollars” in 1969 and his first number one with “A Week in a Country Jail” in 1970.
- “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” (1971), a tribute to his boyhood mentor, became one of his signature recordings and reached number one on the country chart.
- “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine,” written on a napkin in a Miami hotel bar and released in 1972, gave him another number one and remains among his most beloved songs.
- “I Love,” a warm catalog of small pleasures, topped the country chart and crossed over to number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973–74, one of his most popular records.
- Additional chart-toppers followed with “Country Is” (1974), “I Care” (1975), and “Faster Horses (the Cowboy and the Poet)” (1976); as a recording artist he charted seven number-one country singles, while as a songwriter he penned a dozen number ones and more than two dozen additional top-ten hits.
- He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1971 and later hosted the syndicated television series Pop! Goes the Country from 1980 to 1982, succeeding Ralph Emery.
- Hall was also a published author, writing the memoir The Storyteller’s Nashville (1979), the instructional How I Write Songs, Why You Can, and a novel, and he won a 1973 Grammy for the liner notes to Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits. His 1974 children’s album Songs of Fox Hollow was named for his Tennessee farm.
- He met bluegrass songwriter Dixie Deen in 1965 and married her in 1968; beginning in the 1990s the two wrote hundreds of bluegrass songs together and built a studio and publishing operation at Fox Hollow that recorded and championed a generation of bluegrass artists.
- His honors include induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1978), the Country Music Hall of Fame (2008), the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame alongside Dixie (2018), and the national Songwriters Hall of Fame (2019); Rolling Stone named him among the 100 greatest songwriters.
- Hall died at his home in Franklin, Tennessee on August 20, 2021, at age 85. His songs — including widely covered standards such as “That’s How I Got to Memphis” — remain touchstones for country, folk, and bluegrass writers.
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Don RenoPlayed on recordings with Don Reno
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Josh GravesPlayed on recording with Josh Graves
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Tom T. HallPlayed on recording with Tom T. Hall
