Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 151
Critical Junctions in Country Music
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so that she can see the parade. He agrees. “Thank you, mister,” is her response.
Then the little girl asks, “Why does my daddy hate all these people in the parade.”
Hall begins to answer, “Well little girl, you see they are different,” then he looks at
her, noticing that she is blind and replies, “Well, I really don’t know.” That night
he kneels and prays to Jesus, “Would You hold me up, so I can see the parade.”
“Getting along,” and accepting differences is a theme throughout two
albums for children. The “Song of the One Legged Chicken” (1974) is a plea for
tolerance and the acceptance of people with physical handicaps:
Do you like true stories well I do
And that’s why I’m singing this song
A song about a one legged chicken
Who lives in the straw on the floor of my bam
When the egg hatched, the veterinarian told the narrator that the little chicken was
“better off dead,” but the narrator dissented. The chicken grew into a happy crea
ture who now goes cocka-doodle doo, and leaves her benefactor an egg every day.
Hall also writes and sings about all the different animals on the Fox Hollow Ani
mal train and how they get along, as well as about another chicken who has be
friended a duck. They know they are different, look different, and do different
things, but they are very good friends, and when they speak they go “Quackadoodle doo” (1974).
Hall’s concern for environmental degradation can be heard in “100 Chil
dren” and “American the Ugly” as cited above. It is also the theme of “Everybody
Likes to Hear a Bird Sing”(1974) from one of his children’s albums:
Some people buy spray
And they spray it on the land
They kill all the little
bitty bugs that they can
The birds eat the bugs
And it makes them sick
I wish we didn’t have to do that
Interestingly, however. Hall never recorded his most recognized song,
“Harper Valley P.T.A..” It was performed by Jeannie C. Reilly and sold over four
million copies. In the song, a school girl and her widowed mother are criticized by
the “social elite” for their life style—wearing mini-skirts, having a drink in public,
etc. At one point, the mother marches right on into the RT.A. meeting and puts it
“in their face,” revealing, point by point, the hypocrisy in each member’s private