Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 145
Tom T. Hall and Critical Junctions
in Country Music
Popular culture media forms are altered by societal trends, by major events,
and also by the appearances on the scene of particular individuals. No less than
with industries and organizations, charismatic or otherwise notable personages
cause major changes in media forms. The focus of this paper is upon the work of
one such individual, Tom T. Hall, and its transformational effects upon the Coun
try Music Industry.
Tom T. Hall wrote over 500 songs and recorded half that many. In addi
tion to atta ining over fifty chart records, he won a Grammy, forty-six BMI Awards,
and designation as country music’s “Songwriter of the Year.” President Jimmy
Carter called Hall “a poet with a guitar, who knows how to capture the spirit of
America with his words and music.” George Jones creferred to him as “by far the
all-time greatest songwriter/storyteller that country music has ever had.” Acclaim,
however, is not the essence of his impact.
Rather, Hall’s greatest achievement was to help Country Music escape its
regional isolation in the southern mountain area of the United States and become
nationally based. His lyrics provided an escape route for a music that had become
trite and void of serious content and was consequently rejected by non-regional
audiences. Still, Hall did not abandon the style of the music, nor did he reject its
central geographic locus—^Nashville, Tennessee with its Mother Church of Coun
try Music, the Grand Ole Opry. Instead he introduced both to greater audiences
across the country.
The Nashville Scene in the 1950s and 1960s
Country music’s popularity was confined to the American South in the
post-World War II years. These were years in which the South became an es
tranged partner in the system of American Federalism. While the Civil War had
given the region a special separateness, the years from reconstruction to World
War II found certain accommodations between North and South built around an
understanding that the race issue would not become part of the national political
agenda. Instead of a new war of armies, a civil rights war erupted with mass
protests, acts of civil disobedience, and bloodshed. The White South found itself
ostracized and estranged once again, and country music, never fully accepted by
America as a whole, shared that ostracism.
Of course, before the War, during the twenties and the Depression years
of the thirties, southern mountain music performers often mixed and mingled with