Sometimes I lie awake and wonder, What if Tom T. Hall were a cubist?

Actually the song wound up making more sense than I intended it to.  As a result, it’s poised in an awkward position between needing to make either more or less sense, which could lead people to start looking for symbols or something.  There are no symbols.  The genesis of the song was that there was a stretch of a few weeks back in the summer when almost every video I was looking at on Youtube had somebody playing an inexplicably small guitar.  Bobbie Gentry was playing an inexplicably small guitar, Sinead O’Connor was playing an inexplicably small guitar, Marty Robbins seemingly wouldn’t leave the house without the tiniest guitar he could find.  It led me to formulate a maxim, if that’s what you do to maxims, the musical counterpart to Chekhov’s gun:  If you are playing a song on a very small guitar, the song should either be about the very small guitar or contain an explanation of why the guitar is so small.  (I’m working on a series of principles and maxims based on country music.  Another one is the Conway Twitty Principle.  The Conway Twitty Principle can’t be as elegantly stated as the Maxim of the Very Small Guitar, but it goes something like this:  If your name is Harold Jenkins and you want to be a singing star, you may change your name—in fact you are encouraged to do so—but for God’s sake don’t change your name to Conway Twitty.)

Corrections.  The cold Kansas day I referenced in the song was actually January 4, 1987, not 1988, and  I was not not yet twenty-one, I was nineteen, working on a construction crew that built bleachers and grandstands (if you have been to a baseball game at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, you’ve sat on some of my handiwork.) 

And it wasn’t an interstate in Kansas where I got abandoned; it was a KOA campground in Williamson, North Carolina, where seven men on a converted Greyhound bus were rained in for six weeks with nothing but a foosball table for recreation.  I hated foosball before that.  I hate foosball worse now.

And though I lived in Corpus Christi for a good part of the summer of 1998, nothing in particular happened to me there except that I saw Johnny Paycheck in concert at the Surf Club.  He was wracked with emphysema but did a great show flanked by two oxygen bottles about as tall as he was.  He may have had the greatest voice in country music other than George Jones (who may have modeled his style on that of Paycheck, who sang under his real name back then, Donny Young, and who thus demonstrates proper respect for the Conway Twitty Principle.)

Opera news.  Mel and I worked through the ending last week, and he knuckled down and got the score finished yesterday (236 pages.)  Now the director and orchestra and singers and set designers, etc., have two months to get it in shape for the March 30 premiere.  Then it’s just up to the fat lady.

Tom T. Hall:  Part I

I don’t know how much most people know about Tom T. Hall.  I think I know how much most people know about Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton (quite a bit), on the one hand, and about, say, Gary Stewart and Charlie Rich (not so much), on the other hand.  I don’t know if the name “Tom T. Hall” makes most people draw a blank or rings a vague bell or if everybody in the world knows everything I’m about to say about him.  There’s not a very detailed Wikipedia entry on him; so if Wikipedia is any indicator of where somebody registers on the pop culture radar, I’m guessing there are quite a few people who don’t know much about Tom T. Hall.  Here are various introductory Tom T. Hall courses, which are prerequisites to next week’s Tom T. Hall post, all of which are geared toward development of a new principle I’m working on, which is that Tom T. Hall is exactly as relevant as everything else.

Tom T. Hall 101—Intro to Tom T. Hall:  He wrote a string of hits, many recorded by him, many recorded by others, in the late sixties, through the seventies, and into the eighties.  “Harper Valley P.T.A” was one of his first big songs and maybe is his biggest—Jeannie C. Riley sold over 6 million records of it, it was made into a movie, etc.  It’s an easy, one-joke song that for some reason is often thought of in the same breath (if you think in breaths) as “Ode to Billie Joe,” though the two songs have nothing in common except that they are narrative songs that came out in the late sixties, sung by women who didn’t have any equivalent future hits.  Other well known songs are “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine,” “Faster Horses, ” “I Like Beer” and the children’s songs (I assume they’re children songs because I liked them when I was a kid and can’t stand them now) “I Love” and “Sneaky Snake.”  His nickname is “The Storyteller” because many of his best known songs are narratives.

Tom T. Hall 201—Further Studies in Tom T. Hall:  The songs he’s best known for are not his best songs.  That’s not terribly unusual, of course.  Sentimentality sells, and Hall can write sentimental songs with the best of them.  Just the title “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine” is enough to start the eyes misting over.  Hundreds of his songs have been recorded (“all in the same tune,” he admits in the TV interview below), by everybody from Bobby Bare to Kelly Willis to the Drive-by Truckers.  His body of work is honorable and his career has been singular in that nobody else has assumed or shared his role—nobody else carved out a niche as a storyteller songwriter in quite the same vein as Hall (if you carve out niches in veins).  It’s not accurate to say he’s been overlooked, but I think he hasn’t been taken as seriously as some of his contemporary peers.  Hall is one of the Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge songwriters, along with Roger Miller, Mel Tillis, Billie Joe Shaver, Willie Nelson, etc., but has a warmer, fuzzier, more avuncular reputation than the hellraiser songwriters of the sixties and seventies.

Tom T. Hall 321K—Selected Works of Tom T. Hall:  Four of his songs stick with me more than any of his others and more than a lot of other songs do.  One of them is a perfect song.

“Trip to Hyden” and “Homecoming.”  Hall is called “The Storyteller” probably because of his yarn-like songs like “Ballad of a Switchblade” and “Week in a County Jail.”  But “Trip to Hyden” and “Homecoming” are stories in a more literary sense, which is to say they are not yarns, not jokes, don’t have an O. Henry twist at the end, but in three minutes reveal characters and relationships of depth and complexity.  The only younger songwriter I am aware of who is roughly comparable to Tom T. Hall in that respect is James McMurtry.  McMurtry writes some good songs (though at his worst he is snarky and sarcastic and shoots easy targets for the amusement of his superior audience) and line-by-line is more impressive than a whole lot of songwriters, including Tom T. Hall; he is also more self-consciously literary than Tom T. Hall, which isn’t a crime and isn’t surprising, as it’s hard not to be self-conscious in these post- postmodern days.  But Tom T. Hall isn’t really a line-writer.  It seems strange and counterintuitive to find that it’s possible to be a good and even great songwriter without making every line special—you have only three or so verses, maybe a couple of choruses (though not in these two songs), and usually less than three minutes, so you’d think every word would have to shine in the same way that you really can’t waste a line in a short story (in a novel you can fall asleep at the typewriter for a whole page here and there and no one will hold it against you.) 

Hall does write some memorable lines and have some memorable images–I especially like the two lines in “Trip to Hyden”:  ”Every hundred yards a sign proclaimed that Christ was coming soon /  I thought, man, he’d sure be disappointed if he did“—but the overall effect of the song comes from the overall song.  As the saying goes, there’s an art to his artlessness.  “Homecoming” is among the most poignant songs in modern country music; the story of a musician’s hurried, bleary-eyed stop-off at the old homeplace between road gigs, it portrays a heartbreaking distance between a father and son and nothing less than a man’s removal from grace.   “Trip to Hyden,” based on the true story of a Kentucky mine disaster that killed all but one of 40 miners downhole, gives a portrait of grief and an indictment of American industry without raising its voice or, despite the quiet bitterness of the final line, stooping to easy cynicism.  I think of that song a lot, especially the “temporary-looking houses with their lean and bashful kids.”  [No video of this song, but it's number 15 below.  Ignore the widget below the Lala stuff--I can't figure out how to get rid of it.]

Tom T. Hall and Normal Sized Guitar

Tags: cubism, James McMurtry, Kelly Willis, Nutcracker Buck, Roch Voisine, Tom T. Hall, Very Small Guitar, Wade Williams