I was just talking about Tom T Hall last night at Gypsy Jazz rehearsal. I see today he passed yesterday at age 85. When I was working at Opryland in Nashville I could come and go as I pleased in the Grand Ole Opry building where they had TV studios in the basement. They taped the Tom T Hall show there on week days along with a few other early programs before the Nashville Network took off. Actually at that time all of Opryland was a studio. They had the whole park wired so they could do TV broadcasts from the various stages.
Anyway I went down there one afternoon to watch them tape a Tom T Hall program and the guest was Minnie Pearl. They had Tom in a Tux by a Baby Grand Piano with a black background. They were trying to do a superimposition over the black curtains instead of a green screen and had some trouble with the curtains white lining showing though. There was a live audience and we all had to just wait while this guy on a stepladder went around with a can of black Spray Paint touching things up when all of a sudden we all heard Minnie's voice over her Wireless Mic, "What the hell's goin on? I can't wait around all day for this shit, I need to go home and cook dinner!"
"Minnie!" another voice said, "Your Mic is still on!"
I do a Tom T Hall song called Pamala Brown once in a while. It's about how an early girlfriend married somebody else and so therefore Tom could go on pursuing his career as a musician. I can certainly relate to THAT idea! There was a girl I was madly in love with in High School, but she dumped me. I wrote a song about her and sung it on the radio once and much to my surprise, she showed up at the Theatre where I was working the very next week! Was it a coincidence? Or did she hear the Broadcast? I'll never know, but I was glad to see her and her Husband. It did bother me a little that her Husband looked a lot like me at the time.
Onward....