Tom T. Hall: The Person Comes First

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“Write what you know” is not anything that hadn’t been tried before. But Tom T. took the approach to places that it had never been, at least in the context of country songs. The late 1960s and early 1970s found Hall charging ahead with a loosely affiliated gang of writers that included Kristofferson, John Hartford, and Mickey Newbury. These men elevated and altered the language and narrative form of country music, and they blazed a path down which Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine would later meander. Witnesses have seen Jason Isbell and Patty Griffin jogging that path in recent days.

Tom T. Hall wrote the book on songwriting, or at least he wrote a book on songwriting. Johnny Cash called it “The most helpful book I know for both new and experienced songwriters.” One chapter of the book is called “Rules And Tools,” and that chapter includes sections headed, “Think Positive,” “The Title Is The Point,” and “Avoid Too Much Realism.”

The trouble — and it’s actually not a trouble, it’s what Kristofferson would call “a table-thumping smash”— is that Tom T. Hall advice on “Think Positive,” “The Title Is The Point,” and “Avoid Too Much Realism” is along the lines of Bob Dylan advice on “Diction Is Respect,” “Stick To The Set List,” and “Avoid Changing Your Name.”

Ah, Mr. Dylan. In February of 2015, at a MusiCares Person of the Year speech, he offered wobbly dismissals of Hall, saying that he recalled recording in Nashville and reading an article in which Tom T. was “bitching about some kind of new song, and he couldn’t understand what these new kinds of songs that were coming in were about.” Dylan also said that Kristofferson’s monumental ballad, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “blew ol’ Tom T. Hall’s world apart … It might have sent him to the mad house. God forbid he ever heard any of my songs.”

Dylan recorded in Nashville in the late 1960s, through the spring of 1970. During that time, Hall wasn’t bitching about some kind of new song, he was writing some kind of new song. He was writing and singing “A Week In A Country Jail,” and a chorus-less song called “Homecoming,” in which he never says the word “homecoming.” He was writing and singing a chorus-less song called “Ballad Of Forty Dollars,” in which he never says “ballad of forty dollars.” That last one is set in a cemetery back in Hall’s hometown of Olive Hill, Kentucky. It is sung from the perspective of a grave-digger. Tom T. used to work in that very cemetery.

“Think Positive.” “The Title Is The Point.” “Avoid Too Much Realism”: Complete and utter bullshit, much like that misguided section of Dylan’s speech. Asked about it, Hall simply asks back, “What the hell was that all about?” (Which is, by the way, the same question he has said he’d like etched into his gravestone.)

But then he said something more. As in nearly every one of his songs, he refuses to pass judgment, other than to say he likes “Blowing In The Wind” and “Maggie’s Farm” very much. But he does draw a distinction.

“There’s a difference between me and Bob Dylan,” he says. “Dylan’s career was based on imitating legendary folk heroes, like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. He made a career of imitating old folk singers, and today he’s a phenomenal success who has become an old folk singer. He became what he most admired. He’s a product of his subscription to another culture and another time. I invented myself.”

Hall says that in enmity-free observation. It sounds colder in print than he meant when he voiced it. But the distinction is real: Dylan’s genius is born of musical archaeology, fused through atypical intelligence. Hall’s genius is born of internal excavation. Straight, no chaser. Dylan is a cocktail. Hall is a shot.

As for the notion that Kristofferson would somehow have blown his world apart, Hall always considered himself and Kristofferson as part of the same world. Maybe even part of a club of two:

“Kris and I might have created what I call an illusion of literacy in Nashville,” he says. “People said we were the only guys who could describe Dolly Parton without using our hands.”