Consumer Guide Album

Tom T. Hall: The Rhymer and Other Five and Dimers [Mercury, 1973]
One reason Merle Haggard's thought of as the Poet of the Common Man is that he's also in the running for Voice of the Common Man; even with Jerry Kennedy's genius assembly line behind him, Hall's monotone isn't liable to shiver your short hairs unless he gets the words just right. Here he comes close. He honors Ravishing Ruby and remembers his own younger brother, hitching into town for medicine and coffee in the bad winter of 1949. He gets stuck in a motel in Spokane and comes back to Olive Hill with all his faults intact. And he yokes his best political song, about the man who hated freckles and Martin Luther Queen, with one of his worst slow ones, designed for those who find "candy in the windows of my mind" a poignant trope. A−