Hi,
I was deleting some old e-mail and came across the following piece that I
thought I'd repost in light of
some renewd interest in Hall due to Real: The Tom T. Hall Project. It's
pretty outrageous (the post, not the cd, the cd's fantastic).
Karen
Without music, life is a mistake--Friedrich Nietzsche
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Nash Scene Clip
>From this week's Nashville Scene......
In a recent lengthy interview with Tom T. Hall, the 62-year-old
songwriting great brought up a topic he thought needed some attention.
"I've got one more story I have to tell you," he said on a recent misty
morning, as cocks crowed and ducks quacked on the dirt lane outside his
office, situated in a converted barn in Franklin. "It's about Nashville
today. I want you to tell me if you've ever heard of anything like this,
'cause it kind of surprised me, I have to tell you."
Seems Hall--whose bluntly literate, one-of-a-kind songs helped raise
the art of country
songwriting in the '70s--recently sent a few new songs to a major music
publisher on Music Row. He wanted them set in larger type, so he could read
them during a recording session. When the songs returned, Hall perused one,
only to discover a few typos. "I thought maybe they got entered into a
computer and got kicked out wrong," Hall says.
But when he went to record the songs, he noticed that the words to
all of his songs had been changed. He scratched his head and wondered, "Who
in the hell is tangling with my lyrics?"
So the writer of such classics as "Harper Valley P.T.A." and "Ballad
of Forty Bucks" contacted the publishing company. What he heard astounded
him: The firm had hired an employee with a master's degree in English from
Radcliffe College to edit song lyrics submitted by the company's writers.
"I said, `You know, when I write a song, it's pretty much carved in
stone.' " As he talked to a company executive, he grew more incensed. "I
told them, and I know this sounds awfully big of me, but I told them, `I'm
sorry, but I'm a poet. I don't care what this woman thinks of my songs. All
I wanted was a larger font so I could read the words while I was recording.
What I was looking for was a typist, and this person is monumentally
overqualified for the job.' "
Once he hung up, the implications of what had occurred began to
obsess Hall. "I got to thinking, when a major country writer brings
in a song now, do we have to get out a style book from, I don't know, The
Boston Globe, and fix the song? This is terrible! Am I being naive? To me,
lyrics are important. There's nothing incidental in there. I know what I'm
trying to say, and I know how I'm trying to say it. To take it into
somebody and say, `Would you edit this please?,' as if it were a piece of
advertising copy...well, that just blows me away. I still can't believe it.
Is
that what songwriters do today? Do they hand their songs to a secretary and
say, `Can you
edit this?' What would Hank Williams say about that? What would Billy Joe
Shaver say?"
As Hall inquired about the situation with people he knew at the
publishing company, the answers he received only offended him further. "I
was told that, as for my songs, that they don't use words like that
anymore, that it wasn't current," he said. "I said, `Who doesn't? I'm still
alive! I'm here on the planet, and I use words like that. What would this
person say if they heard `Once Upon a Midnight Clear?' Would they say it
had too much alliteration, that people don't talk like that anymore?"
But Hall, being the way he is, started to see the humor in the
situation. "I finally just asked them, `Look, have you ever heard that
classic song, "I Am Not Misbehavin'?" ' They told me no, they hadn't heard
of it. I said, `That's my point.' "
--Michael McCall
