Consumer Guide Album

Tom T. Hall: The Essential Tom T. Hall: The Story Songs [Mercury, 1988]
He makes his stories seem easy, like he jots them down on coffee break, and nobody in music can touch them--damn few in fiction, either. I'd call him a cross between Chekhov and O. Henry, but that would date him, because next to what the lit crowd calls sentimentality, sometimes played as a capper and sometimes as an offhand theme, the self-conscious narrator is his most characteristic device--one he never seems self-conscious about, fancy that. He also sings and picks, of course; his sometimes pensive, sometimes rowdy monotone puts across variations on a tiny, well-polished store of classic melodies. Except maybe for "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine," in which a janitor feeds Hall one of the sentimental truisms that are his nonnarrative downfall, there's not a clinker in this twenty-item carload. Nobody who owns fewer than eighteen of them should do without it. A