Tom T. Hall, one of country music’s most prolific songwriters who penned a number of popular hits recorded by other artists — including the Grammy Award-winning “Harper Valley P.T.A.” in 1968 — before showcasing his own vocals and guitar picking as a popular headline entertainer, died on Aug. 20 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 85.
His son, Dean Hall, confirmed the death but didn’t immediately provide a cause.
The plain-spoken Mr. Hall was first and foremost a gifted writer, which led to his nickname, “The Storyteller.” He was listed among Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 greatest songwriters. In a career that spanned five decades, Mr. Hall composed unflinching songs about working-class life in small towns that are by turns poignant, insightful and sardonic.
“He, Dolly Parton and a handful of others really lifted the craft of country song writing to a new level of sophistication, insight and sensitivity that generations of fans will still respond to,” author and music historian Robert K. Oermann said in an interview. “His songs are so extraordinary . . . He just tells you the tale and by doing so makes you feel passionately, whether it’s war or love or politics. At his finest, he is deeply insightful on the human condition.”
Mr. Hall wrote 12 songs that reached No. 1 one on Billboard’s country music chart and more than 25 Top 10 songs. His biggest hits as a performer included “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died,” “I Like Beer,” “Faster Horses (The Cowboy and the Poet),” “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine,” “A Week in a Country Jail,” “That’s How I Got to Memphis” and “I Love,” in which he recounted all the things he cherished from “little baby ducks, old pickup trucks . . . I love coffee in a cup, little fuzzy pups.”
Mr. Hall had some early success writing songs for country performers such as Dave Dudley, Johnnie Wright and Jimmy C. Newman. His first song to reach No. 1 was Wright’s recording of the war ballad “Hello Vietnam” in 1965. Newman had Top 10 country hits with Mr. Hall’s “D.J. for a Day” (1963) and “Back Pocket Money” (1966), which recounts the story of a man whose wife controls the family purse strings to keep her husband faithful.
My Baby won’t give me
No back pocket money
She’s afraid I’ll spend it
On the girls downtown
Front pocket money
Just the nickel and dime stuff
Sure cuts down on the runnin’ around
Thomas T. Hall was born on May 25, 1936, in Olive Hill, a small town in eastern Kentucky. He was one of eight children. His father was a laborer and part-time minister who worked at a brick plant, and his mother was a homemaker.
From an early age, Mr. Hall was a prolific reader and was captivated by music broadcasts on the radio, including Ernest Tubb’s “Midnite Jamboree.” He wrote in his autobiographical “The Storyteller’s Nashville” — originally published in 1979 and expanded in 2016 — that he knew from the age of 4 that he would someday be a songwriter in Nashville. A Christmas poem he wrote when he was 8 provided an early glimpse of the imagery and emotion he would later convey in his songs:
Walking through fields of snow
Lonely and Dejected
While the real Christmas
Shimmered somewhere
Far off in the City
When he was about 9, Mr. Hall visited the home of a friend who had a guitar but no interest in playing it. He seized the opportunity and learned to play chords on his own. Around the same time, he began to write songs. Overhearing a young married couple arguing next door, the line “Haven’t I been good to you?” stuck in his head as a lyric that he would build his first song around.
Mr. Hall’s teen years were marked by tragedy. His mother died of cancer when he was 13, and his father was severely injured in an accidental shooting, leading Mr. Hall to drop out of school in the ninth grade. He cared for his father and siblings, worked in a textile factory and as a gravedigger while performing with a bluegrass band that had a lot of airtime on radio stations in the region.
He went on to serve in the U.S. Army for four years beginning in 1957. Stationed in Germany, he performed original songs on the Armed Forces radio Network, traveled with a western swing band and earned a high school diploma.
After the Army stint, Mr. Hall studied at Roanoke College in Virginia worked as a DJ for a number of radio stations, including WBLU in Roanoke. It was there that he met Jimmy Key, a music publisher with NewKeys Publishing. He sold several songs to Key before the publishing company offered to pay him a weekly draw of $50 to move to Nashville. The weekly draw was an advance payment against the royalties Hall hoped to earn on the sale of songs.
He arrived in Nashville on New Year’s Day of 1964 and treated songwriting as a full-time job. He wrote five or six songs per week in longhand on yellow legal pads, later transitioning to an antique typewriter. Despite some early success, Mr. Hall said he was making so little money after a year in Nashville that he contemplated returning to radio.
Key encouraged him to stick it out. What followed was a decades-long career as a songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, weaving his narrative storytelling, philosophy and poetry with toe-tapping melodies. By the time Mr. Hall had signed with Mercury Records in 1967, he had added the middle initial “T” to his name. He released his debut album, “Ballad of Forty Dollars,” in 1969.
Over the years, some of the biggest names in country music would record Mr. Hall’s songs, including Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and was named to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
Mr. Hall’s biggest hit as a songwriter was the cultural touchstone “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” recorded by Jeannie C. Riley, who won a Grammy in 1968 for best female country vocal performance. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” sold millions of copies, hit No. 1 on the country chart and spawned a movie and a television series starring Barbara Eden.
The song tells the story of a widowed woman, Mrs. Johnson, who receives a letter from the PTA criticizing her for wearing short dresses and for “drinking and a-running ’round with men and goin’ wild.” Mrs. Johnson shows up at the next PTA meeting wearing a miniskirt and highlights the hypocrisy of the other board members, concluding:
And then you have the nerve to tell me
You think as a mother I’m not fit
Well, this is just a little Peyton Place
You’re all Harper Valley hypocrites
Mr. Hall said that he wrote the song two years before it was published but had the idea for 20 years. Much like his first song, it captured a scene from his childhood in Olive Hill.
“When I was a small boy, there was a lady in town who had taken on the entire PTA for their indiscretions,” he wrote in “A Storyteller’s Nashville.”
“The idea stuck with me for years,” he added. “It was on this balmy afternoon in 1966, sitting at my checkered tablecloth, that I came up with the actual song. It was not hard to write, and I don’t recall that it took more than an hour or so.”
His first marriage, to Opal “Hootie” McKinney, ended in divorce. Survivors include their son.
Mr. Hall’s second wife, the former Iris “Dixie” Lawrence, died in 2015 after 45 years of marriage. They wrote bluegrass songs together and were named bluegrass songwriters of the year 12 times by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America. Both were inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame.
In 1972, Mr. Hall won a Grammy for best album notes for “Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits.” He expanded his writing to include two novels and the book “How I Write Songs, Why You Can.”
“Most of my songs are biographical,” Mr. Hall said at a live show at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville in 2011. “I was not very good at making up songs. I was a very proficient liar, you’d think I could have made up a song . . . It didn’t work for me so I just wrote down things I knew about.”
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