The results formed his fifth album, In Search of a Song, a landmark release that perfectly encapsulates the Tom T. Hall’s friend and fellow songwriter Bill Littleton loved the idea and agreed to film the entire event, and all Hall would take would be a couple bottles of good whiskey and his guitar.

And talk to people to find them, at that. So, the remedy? Why, drive around Kentucky and look for song ideas, of course.

That sum-bitch writes five or six songs a day himself.” Hall burned himself out trying to prove it, and his initial fears of being a performer eventually came to haunt him. As he says in his autobiography, The Storyteller’s Nashville, other writers would go around Nashville saying, “Don’t take Tom T. He began to feel the pressure, and for awhile indulged in it, proving he could always top his latest success. Of course, the success of that song, as well as Hall’s own material released as a solo act, took a mental toll on him. Riley scored a huge country and pop hit with his “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” in 1968, a song filled with storytelling wit and unflinching honesty. They provide a bedrock that artists expand from to craft their own unique take on something familiar, but with Hall, they didn’t need to be artificially interweaved within they were just stories of life, plain and simple.įittingly enough, that distanced storytelling perspective is enough to show how Hall rose up through Nashville’s ranks, observing from afar and letting others have the spotlight with his words. We’re familiar with songwriting tropes in country music: the brokenhearted fools wasting away in smoke-filled bars, the affinity for mama, trucks, trains, and prisons, and the odes to rural pride – just to name a few. It’s the sort of songwriting style one would likely immediately associate with country music, yet it’s still uniquely Hall’s alone. Therein lies the paradox with his work: Hall’s easygoing, conversational style carries a natural surface appeal that’s warm and inviting, but it’s sharply detailed material where the true meaning can pass one by if they’re sucked in to the atmosphere and don’t pay enough attention to the stories told. Hall may have sang about regular people with the precision of a journalist chronicling every seemingly minute detail, but even he couldn’t help how those everyday experiences contained subtle moments of extraordinary insight.

What a Book! by Tom T. Hall