Song of the Day 9/1: Tom T. Hall, “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine”

Songwriter and country singer Tom T. Hall died last month, and the world lost a wise old soul when he did. Hall wrote more than 20 No. 1 hits on the country charts, and sang several himself, but he’s mainly known through his only No. 1 on the Hot 100, the 1968 crossover smash “Harper Valley PTA.”

That song is a good example of why he was called “The Storyteller” — he wrote narratives that could have been short stories, often sentimental but never schlocky. Today’s song reads like a newspaper column — it sprang from a conversation Hall had on the last night of the Democratic National Convention in 1972 with a janitor in a Miami Beach hotel bar. The gray-haired man looked back on his life and concluded the only things of value in the world were the three listed in the title. (I’ve never tried watermelon wine, but he was spot on about the other two.) He approached his craft like a journalist, once explaining, “I’m not a judge, I’m a witness. I found out, in writing story songs, if you don’t write down exactly what happened, you’re not writing, you’re relating.”

Did the context — the Democrats had just nominated George McGovern on his quixotic campaign against Richard Nixon — contribute to the mood Hall evokes? Well, his judgment after the election was, “America bought a new used car,” so you be the judge.

Hall wasn’t named to the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2008, long after his heyday; he scaled back on performing in the ’90s, when country music went to full-bore pop. He attributed the cold shoulder to the fact that he wasn’t popular in Nashville circles, mainly because he worked alone on his farm and didn’t hang out with the crowd. “Sometimes you’re conspicuous by your absence,” he told an interviewer. “You offend someone by not being in the right place at the right time. There’s a lot of schmoozing in Nashville.”

I thought this one would be appropriate for today, given the weather. The lament of a lifelong loser, it includes an observation that Hall phrased better than most: “I learned what it means to be somebody’s baby. They let you lie in bed by yourself and cry.”