For Tom T. Hall, the Grass Is Bluer on the Other Side of Retirement

For Tom T. Hall, the Grass Is Bluer on the Other Side of Retirement

By Wendy Newcomer

Eight years ago, after 34 years of entertaining, legendary singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall retired. Yet each day he's still up at 5:30 AM, writing songs, listening to bluegrass music, painting, drawing and sometimes recording bands in the studio at his Fox Hollow farm 20 miles from Downtown Nashville. This is retirement?

May 31, 2005

"I'm just retired from the big-time music business," clarified the man known worldwide as "The Storyteller." Hall has written Country classics including "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine," "I Love," "Country Is," "I Care" and "Harper Valley P.T.A.," a three-week No. 1 hit and CMA Single of the Year for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968.

On a rainy afternoon, Hall, dressed casually in jeans and a forest green sweatshirt, drives his Ford Explorer Sport Trac around Fox Hollow. From his office - which he built to look like a barn, he said, to throw off nosy salespeople - he slowly winds up the hill to his acoustic recording studio, where his wife Miss Dixie waits. Hall truly has retired from the business. He rarely gives interviews, and wanted to make sure this one was for CMA Close Up and not for any newsstand magazine.

"People think because you're private, you have something you don't want them to know," Hall said, inching up the driveway. "If they want to come out and watch me paint or dig potatoes or mend fences, I don't care. I don't do interviews not because I have anything to hide, but when you retire, the word has a meaning to me. It's a place in life, a part of the journey. You just don't quit work. You develop an attitude where you can do what you please."

And what he pleases these days is writing bluegrass music with Miss Dixie. Hall opens the door to the studio. "This used to be Miss Dixie's kennels when she

showed basset hounds," Hall explained of the remodeled building. "These are all of her awards," he said, pointing to walls lined with sketches of prize basset hounds and dog show awards. Stacked on a small table perpendicular to the recording console is a handful of CDs by various bluegrass artists. "We listen to the new stuff and see if there's anybody we think could do one of our songs," he said. "Sometimes we'll get hooked on someone and listen to them two or three days in a row."

Hall sings on Larry Sparks' new CD, 40 - a testament to his love for Sparks and bluegrass. He rarely records his own voice any more.

"I really appreciate Tom T. Hall," said Larry Sparks. "When I heard we were going to use his studio to record this project, I knew that I would like to have him sing with me. The song that he and Dixie wrote for me is 'I Want You to Meet My Friend.' It's a gospel-related song, with meaningful words in it. Of course, Tom T. has always been one of my favorites, as a singer and a writer. I was just thrilled to have him. I wanted him to sing the first half of the song. You know who it is [when he sings]. He has a universal voice. He's probably one of the few that's made it, that could come back and make it again. He's got that kind of a voice.

"Tom T.'s just a plain old Country person, just like the rest of us. It was an honor to use his studio. He loves bluegrass and acoustic music, and he appreciates where I'm coming from."

Country artists continue to record the 69-year-old's songs. Merle Haggard recorded two for an upcoming project on Capitol Records Nashville. Arista Nashville recording artist Alan Jackson took Hall's "Little Bitty" to the top of the charts in 1996.

"I was a little bit surprised - and pleased," said Hall of Jackson's cover, "because it's a lot of money, you know. It used to be that you'd have a song recorded by a major Country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership. So there's a lot more money involved in it now than there was when I was in it. A good songwriter made about as much money as a good automatic transmission specialist. It's a different thing now. There's really tons of money involved in it.

"You know, I love these kids," said the elder statesman of today's Country artists. "I think they're better looking than we were. They sing better than we could. They're making tons of money. I think it's wonderful."

And he credits the CMA for Country Music's continuing and increasing success. "If you wonder what the CMA has done for the music business, for instance, if you're paying your dues and wondering, 'What do they do?' - the CMA changed the name of a music, just through public relations and dogged insistence.

"It was always hillbilly music," he recalled. "And when the CMA was formed, they wanted to call it Country Music. Now that's the norm. But for an organization to set out to change the entire image of an art form seems like a colossal, phenomenal undertaking. And then to succeed is a marvelous success, wouldn't you say?"

If Hall were just starting out today, chances are he'd play at the CMA Music Festival. In fact, he was one of the artists on the bill for the first-ever Fan Fair® in 1972. "I suppose I did - I played at the first everything," he deadpanned.

Hall remembered the early days of his career in the late '60s, when he was a young

songwriter and reluctant recording artist.

"Jerry Kennedy wanted me to make records," he said of his longtime producer. "I said, 'I just want to write songs.' He said, 'If you don't record these songs, nobody's ever going to hear 'em.' That really frightened me. So that's when I started recording. Because the songs were so personal, so autobiographical."

Hall's plainspoken, simple stories struck a chord with Country fans everywhere. "I never fixed a story," he declared. "I didn't make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it instead of me telling them pointedly, 'What this song is all about is, you're a bad guy and I'm a good one.'

"I don't know that I did this methodically or intentionally," he continued, "but it was my style of writing. I'd tell them exactly what happened and leave the listener the moral options on the song. That's been my biggest success."

As for his biggest personal success, Hall answered the question with - what else - another good story.

"When I was younger and had a lot of money, I drove a 10-year-old Pontiac convertible," he said. "It was a wonderful car, great character. And no front suspension, so when you'd cross a railroad track, it just went in all directions at once. It was amusing and entertaining. My bass player said, 'Man, if I had your kind of money, I'd be driving a Porsche.' I said, 'Well I have a plan here. I don't want them to [have to] have a benefit to bury me.' So that's what I'm most proud of."