Tom T. Hall Biography | Country Music | Ken Burns

Hall’s composition, “DJ for a Day,” was picked up by NewKeys Music and recorded by Jimmy C. Newman. After the song hit No. 1 on the country chart, followed up by his Top 10 song, “Mad,” Hall moved to Nashville. Throughout the coming decades, Hall would pen such classics as “(Margie’s at) the Lincoln Park Inn,” “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” and “Little Bitty.”

Hall began his career as a recording artist in 1967 and had a series of hits, including the country No. 1s “A Week in a Country Jail,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died,” “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine,” “I Love,” “Country Is,” “I Care,” and “Faster Horses.” All these songs were self-penned and bear Hall’s trademarks: a keen sensitivity to the problems of plain folks, a gift for tale-spinning, acute attention to detail, and an economical writing style, influenced by writer Ernest Hemingway. With a genius for capturing the nuances and speech patterns of folks living in small southern towns, Hall is credited by historian Bill C. Malone as having “restored the old tradition of storytelling” to country music.

In later decades, Hall and his wife and collaborator, Miss Dixie, focused on bluegrass music, advancing the careers of fledgling and established musicians and creating bluegrass music themselves. Operating from their farm outside Nashville, they ran music publishing companies and a state-of-the-art studio. Together, they won the Bluegrass Songwriter of the Year awards for a dozen years between 2002 and 2015. Hall was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, and in 2012 was presented with the BMI Icon award for songwriters who have had a “unique and indelible influence on generations of music makers.”

Born: May 25, 1936, Olive Hill, Kentucky

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