Tom T. Hall wrote songs from stories people didn’t know they had

With a richly textured voice and soul, Tom T. Hall captured the simple moments and turned them into snapshots of our lives.

Tom T Hall found several songs while touring Australia.

Thomas T. Hall, songwriter, born Kentucky, May 25, 1936. Died August 20, aged 85.

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Tom T. Hall heard a story on every street. He lived surrounded by them and the stories of others, even if they couldn’t see them.

His most famous song came from an encounter with a cleaner working late at a hotel while Hall had a nightcap after a gig in Florida’s Flamingo Park. (That concert was its own story: it was outside the Miami Beach Convention Centre where the Democrats were choosing their candidate for the 1972 US election. The Chicago convention of 1968 had ended up in riots and tear gas. Four years later Democrat organisers planned for music “to distract the hippies”.)

Back at the hotel, Hall, who then had a Johnny Cash-like enthusiasm for alcohol, began talking to the cleaner.

The conversation went just as Hall later sang:

“I was sittin’ in Miami pourin’ blended whiskey down

When this old grey black gentleman was cleanin’ up the lounge.”

Hall discovers the fellow turned “65, about 11 months ago”. Unburdening himself, the stranger continued:

“Ain’t but three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime

But old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”

Flying home the next morning, Hall found a napkin in his pocket on which was written “watermelon wine” and wrote out the previous night’s story on a sick bag on the trip back to Nashville.

“If I had been fabricating the song, it would have taken 15 years, but I just wrote down what happened.”

(Old Dogs, Children And) Watermelon Wine charted at No.20 in Australia in May 1973, and was nominated for a Grammy. It is often covered and a Swedish version topped the charts there.

Hall found several songs while touring Australia. He strolled far from the regional centre at which he was performing that night.

“I walked past this little house. It was a little five-room house painted white with shutters, a picket fence, a car in front of this little wooden garage and a little dog in the yard.”

He was taken by the common ambition of ordinary people, whether they be in Kempsey or Kentucky. “This is universal, this notion of having a contained domestic situation. I thought, so it’s all right to be little bitty.”

In a coffee shop he approached a waitress: “I said, ‘May I ask you a question?’ and she said, ‘Certainly’. I said, ‘Does little bitty mean anything in Australia?’ She said, ‘Oh yes, it’s something very tiny!’ I said, ‘Good. Thank you very much’.”

Country superstar Alan Jackson topped the Billboard chart with Little Bitty in 1996.

On an earlier tour Hall encountered Sydney’s Kings Cross and turned it into a song on his 1975 album, I Wrote A Song About It, with lyrics that need no explanation:

“They don’t call it real love on Macleay Street it’s just using somebody for a time

They don’t pretend it’s real love on Macleay Street

They don’t break hearts like you’ve been breaking mine.”

He wrote Harper Valley PTA – based on an event he witnessed at school – which Jeannie C Riley recorded in 1968. It inspired a film and TV series.

His biggest hit was I Love, a fourth Billboard country No.1, and he proved smarter than the censors.

When asked to rework the line “bourbon in a glass and grass”, he changed it to “old TV shows and snow”.

In the 1990s he began making music from the poems of Henry Lawson that he had fallen in love with after noticing Lawson’s meter matched that in which he wrote. He performed one, The Water Lily, on tour here in 1994.

His friends were many and varied, among them singer John Williamson, John Laws and Johnny Cash, and he was close to a peanut farmer from Georgia.

“He told me once he was going to run for president,” said Hall.

“Of what,” Hall had asked.

“Of the United States,” replied Jimmy Carter.