Country singer Tom T. Hall dies; wrote ‘Harper Valley PTA’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tom T. Hall, the singer-songwriter who composed “Harper Valley P.T.A.” and sang about life’s simple joys as country music’s consummate blue collar bard, has died. Along with such contemporaries as Kris Kristofferson, John Hartford and Mickey Newbury, Hall helped usher in a literary era of country music in the early ’70s, with songs that were political, like “Watergate Blues” and “The Monkey That Became President,” deeply personal like “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” and philosophical like “ Watermelon Wine.” “In all my writing, I’ve never made judgments,” he said in 1986. Throughout the ’70s, Hall became one of Nashville’s biggest singer-songwriters, with multiple hit songs including, “I Love,” “Country Is,” “I Care,” “I Like Beer,” and “Faster Horses ” He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978. They asked him what was country, and he said, ‘If it sounds country, it’s country.’ So that’s my philosophy.” He married English-born songwriter Dixie Deen in 1968, and the two would go on to write hundreds of bluegrass songs after Hall retired from performing in the 1990s, including “All That’s Left” which Miranda Lambert covered on her 2014 album, “Platinum.” Dixie Hall died in 2015.