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The liner notes to The Essential Tom T. Hall, a 1987 compilation
reissued on CD last year by Mercury, feature an uncommonly wide array of
testimonials. There are the usual raves from peers: Johnny Cash shares a
few personal memories; George Jones calls Hall "the all time greatest
songwriter/storyteller that country music has ever produced." And Don
Tyson, who hired Hall to stump for his chicken empire, calls him "A
Great American." But then Kurt Vonnegut chimes in with a recollection of
how he first met his good friend Hall, all-star catcher Johnny Bench
enthuses about Hall's hit "Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine," and
Billy Carter writes that his mother trusted Hall "because a man that
could sing about baby ducks the way he did loved animals, and a man that
loved animals had to love people and life."
Hall is best known for writing "Harper Valley P.T.A.," probably the
only country song to inspire a movie and a sitcom. But in his nearly
four-decade career he has also worked as a radio jingle writer and DJ,
written four novels, and toured college campuses lecturing on literature
with old pals like Alex Haley, accumulating a diverse but rabid fan base
along the way. As a performer he's had his share of top-five hits--"A
Week in a Country Jail," "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died," and "I
Love," to name a few--but his bread and butter has been the thousand or
so songs he's written for the likes of Jones, Waylon Jennings, Flatt &
Scruggs, Gram Parsons, Bobby Bare, Loretta Lynn, Alan Jackson, and even
Perry Como.
Longtime Chicagoan Mark Linn got an introduction to Hall in the
early 90s, when he caught a performance of his "That's How I Got to
Memphis" by Lucinda Williams in Baltimore. Over the years Linn has
dedicated himself to reviving interest in Love front man Arthur Lee and
flaky folkie Michael Hurley, and by 1995 he'd become so enamored of
Hall's oeuvre that, with the help of former Thurston's booker Justin
Bass, he began planning a tribute record. The two originally planned to
release it on Linn's tiny Delmore label, which had issued early work by
the High Llamas, Scarce, and Wild Carnation, but once artists like Cash,
Joe Henry, Ralph Stanley, Whiskeytown, Richard Buckner, Ron Sexsmith,
and Mark Olson and Victoria Williams came on board, Linn says, they
decided to try licensing it to a bigger label.
In late 1996 Linn and Bass met with Luke Lewis, the head of
Mercury's Nashville department. "He knew it wasn't going to be a big
moneymaker, but he thought it would be cool to have because Tom T. Hall
was on Mercury," says Linn. Lewis made Linn and Bass a verbal offer, but
before it could be put into writing it was overruled by bean counters in
New York. After six more months of protracted negotiations, Linn and
Bass decided they'd rather put the record out themselves.
In the summer of 1997, while they were waiting on a bank loan, a
tape of the record fell into the hands of Sire records founder Seymour
Stein, the eccentric who gave the world the Ramones and Madonna. When
Stein called, Linn says, "he was so charming. He knew more about country
than anyone on Music Row, and he sang Jimmie Rodgers songs to me on the
phone. He blew my mind. What I didn't realize was that he's a completely
elusive character, and when we started talking business he changed a
lot. He became a lot tougher and we had a lot of shouting matches." It
took nearly another year and a half for Sire to bring out Real: The Tom
T. Hall Project, and when it did, in December, it got lost in the
Christmas rush. But last week it popped up at number 35 on the Gavin
Report's Americana radio chart.
The album contains some real gems. Kelly Willis nails "That's How I
Got to Memphis"--the last track commissioned since, Linn admits, he'd
held the tune for Lucinda Williams, who had promised to contribute and
whose father, poet Miller Williams, is friends with Hall. (Williams was
busy recording her notoriously perfect record, Car Wheels on a Gravel
Road.) Syd Straw and the Skeletons rip through "Harper Valley P.T.A.,"
Freedy Johnston turns the trucker song "Coffee, Coffee, Coffee" into a
countrypolitan ballad complete with Floyd Cramer-style piano, and
Calexico gives the mariachi treatment to "Tulsa Telephone Book," which
contains the irresistible couplet "I was in Tulsa and didn't have
anything going / She lived in Tulsa and didn't have anything on."
Despite some less interesting musical cuts, lines like that one keep
the 17-song collection a head or two above the everlasting flood of
tribute albums. Hall's narratives are rich with small, telling details
and his flawed characters are presented without prejudice; his
ecumenical prose frees the singers to interpret the songs as they see
fit, without worrying about measuring up to some "definitive"
performance. Henry does quirky justice to "Homecoming," the story of a
touring country singer who drops in on his father after missing his
mother's funeral, with a spare backing of down-tempo hip-hop breakbeats;
and "Old Enough to Want To (Fool Enough to Try)," about a guy
halfheartedly trying to avoid a romantic entanglement, survives even
Jonny Polonsky's lackluster guitar-and-melodica treatment thanks to
classic cracks like "I hope that gleam you have in your eye / Is a
reflection from the buttons on your blouse."
Hall, who's currently fishing in Florida, couldn't be reached for
his comments on the album, but Linn says he's been enthusiastic about it
from the start. He personally asked Cash to record "I Washed My Face in
the Morning Dew" and agreed to an especially low royalty rate. In the
process, he even became reacquainted with some of his early material:
when Linn and Bass played him Buckner's cover of "When Love Is Gone,"
recorded by Bobby Bare in the 70s, he responded, "That's real pretty,
but I didn't write that song."
With so much more left to rediscover, the Tom T. Hall Project is
ongoing: Linn and Bass are considering a second various-artists
collection, and plan to release a CD of trucker fave Dave Dudley singing
Hall's songs in late spring.
