Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 152

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Popular Culture Review

life. “Hypocrites with a capital 'H ’.” It was the 1960s, and the song hit the chord
that America was hearing loud and clear outside of Nashville.
Bottomline: Impacts on the Way to Becoming a Footnote
Tom T. Hall’s impact was direct: Nashville gained a new respect. Addi
tionally, Hall helped Nashville to build a new Opryland theme park and a new
Grand ole opry house. Television crews became a permanent fixture on the Nash
ville stage, and artists were courted by the music producers and managers based on
the two coasts. Nashville went to New York and to Los Angeles. Hall’s own
forays into urban sophisticated America gave him renown and made him money,
but he was never incorporated into the new society that began to surround country
music in the eighties and nineties.
Inexplicably, Hall was not only left out of the the new scenes, but was
almost purposely left behind. While his writing persisted, his role as a performer
gradually faded, and he took on the persona of a retiree of sorts. He traveled a
college circuit as a speaker with good friends Miller Williams and Kurt Vonnegut
talking about the things he used to sing about. His songs would be recorded occa
sionally but they were not played on major country radio stations and they did not
sell well. He knew more hits through other singers. His own performances were
not in conformity with a new sterility that was imposed on country music by the
outside producers, whose quest was always the bottomline, the maximum profit.
The new producers controlling Nashville discovered that once there were national
audiences open to them, they would have to struggle not to offend those audi
ences.
Once more country lyrics emphasized the simple, the non-political. Hall’s
style of singing was replaced with a oneness of beat and rhythm that would permit
line dancing for persons who could care less about the impact of lyrics. Perhaps
the new songs had to conform to desires of tavern owners to sell more beer to the
dancers. Tom T. Hall has become a footnote on today’s scene, overlooked by a
national music form that he greatly influenced. Maybe this is a fate he could not
escape. However, those that write the history of popular culture must record his
important roles in the transition of country music from its moribund southern cul
tural isolation in the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ‘60’s into a popular culture form that is
today very national if not international in its base.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

William Thompson