Everything from Jesus to Jack Daniels B+.The Rhymer and Other Five and Dimers A.Hall was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. Hall Sings Miss Dixie and Tom T., was a collaborative effort between the two. From their Nashville-area home known as Fox Hollow (which inspired Hall’s beloved 1974 children’s album Songs of Fox Hollow), the pair wrote and recorded bluegrass music, championing the careers of other bluegrass musicians as well. Hall’s work was often intertwined with that of his late wife Dixie, a songwriter and musician who became his collaborator until her death in 2015. There’s at least a dozen categories of song that he wrote arguably the best ever example of. The greatest storyteller songwriter of all time. He shared some of his pointers for aspiring tunesmiths in the 1976 book How I Write Songs, Why You Can. The multi-talented Hall also branched out into writing books, releasing The Storyteller’s Nashville in 1979, then The Laughing Man of Woodmont Cove in 1982, The Acts of Life in 1986, and Spring Hill, Tennessee in 1990. Among his Number Ones from the era are the barroom memory “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine,” “I Love,” “Country Is,” and “Faster Horses (The Cowboy and the Poet).” His plainspoken delivery and slice-of-life tableaus were easily approachable, ranging in tone from humorous to hefty on Seventies albums like Rhymers and Other Five and Dimers, The Storyteller, and Country Is.

Hall began to record his own compositions as well, signing with Mercury Records in 1967 and joining the Grand Ole Opry in 1971 as he was beginning to pile up hits under his own name. Hall’s first Number One came in 1965 with Johnnie Wright’s version of “Hello Vietnam.”

After returning to civilian life, Hall was working as a radio DJ in Virginia when a publisher heard his song “D.J. He joined the Army in 1957 and sometimes performed on the Armed Services Radio Network while stationed in Germany. Hall on May 25th, 1936, in Olive Hill, Kentucky, Hall began playing music at a young age and performed with a bluegrass band, the Kentucky Travelers, while he was a teenager. (In January 2022, the Williamson County Medical Examiner’s office confirmed to Rolling Stone the manner of death was suicide.)īorn Thomas T. Hall’s son Dean confirmed his father’s death.

Hall, the Country Music Hall of Fame member known as “The Storyteller” for his detailed narrative songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” “I Love,” and “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” died Friday at his home in Franklin, Tennessee.

What a Book! by Tom T. Hall