Tom T. Hall, Country Music's Storyteller, Captured Life's Humble Moments
"I don't like to talk down to children," Tom T. Hall told me over a decade ago. He didn't condescend to me either, even though I was a young, somewhat green interviewer back then, probably overreaching in the questions I asked on the two occasions when he welcomed me into the studio behind his home, and he was a beloved and revered Country Music Hall of Famer. From the mid-1960s, when first started working as a songwriter, until he died Aug. 20 at the age of 85, he was never one to talk down to an audience.
By the time I sat down with Hall, he'd arrived at a way of telling his origin story that felt like a pleasing yarn, a tale that tethered his intellectual ambitions down to earth.
He'd begun his life in the Appalachian foothills of northeastern Kentucky on hard labor, heavy reading and bluegrass band-leading; he joined the Army so that he could
