The Sunday-evening program “The Big Broadcast”, NPR’s token sop to middle-aged white
males, tonight offered something
unusual: A country song, and
not from the radio-drama 1940’s ff. fare
that forms the bulk of the show:
“The Ballad of Forty Dollars”, by Tom. T. Hall.
Here is an album version:
Thoughts:
(1) This is one
more example (if more were needed) of why Rock&Roll is for
adolescents; Country, for adults.
(2) I have
spent the weekend immersed in
reading and thinking about German history and literature from the onset of the
Great War through Weimar. Not at all in the mood for
anything shallower than that.
Yet, this song is surely as
deep and as meaningful as anything
that Tucholsky ever wrote.
(3) It is
depressing, to sample the effusions of some potentate or bigwig, which turn out
to be worthless. Yet such
instances as this, more than compensate: People you have never heard of, who are absolutely worth
listening to.
You mostly won’t find them on the vertical power-structure
of television -- or, if so, buried in peripheral glitz -- but (if at all)
horizontally, through friends-of-friends;
which is why I bother to post this, though I know less than do any one of you, about this man.
[Update 29 July] A couple of you were incredulous that I had never heard of this man.
This is probably connected with the fact that I have spent the past fifty years residing on a remote region of Saturn,
where reception is poor.
Tom T. Hall could count Jimmy Carter as a fan.
ReplyDeleteThe album which has the above song also has several others with punchlines. Probably the reason he was not a great deal more popular is that his songs often have a bite -- a sort of mean edge to them.
He also wrote this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr4y2_BqHYg