ENTERTAINMENT

Dixie Hall, prolific bluegrass songwriter dies at 80

Peter Cooper
pcooper@tennessean.com
The legendary country songwriter Tom T. Hall and his wife, Dixie, stand outside the studio at their home in Franklin, Tenn. Sept. 29, 2007.

Dixie Hall was a bluegrass and country music songwriter, a music journalist, an animal rights activist, an independent record label boss and a devoted wife of 46 years to Country Music Hall of Famer Tom T. Hall.

Most of all, she was a collector and encourager of people. A community organizer of sorts, known as "Miss Dixie," there to help those who raised voices in song.

Mrs. Hall, who died Friday Jan. 16 at age 80 after a lengthy illness, wrote more than 500 commercially recorded bluegrass songs, more than any female songwriter in bluegrass history. Her compositions were also sung by country hit-makers from Johnny Cash to Miranda Lambert.

But she was most interested in gathering talented musicians together, and in including outliers the way Mother Maybelle Carter, Tex Ritter and others included her when she came to America in 1961, on a ship from her native England.

"I'm trying to ease their way, in the same way that the Carters and so many others have eased mine," she told Nancy Cardwell for a 2013 cover story in "Bluegrass Unlimited." "If a few dollars worth of studio time, or groceries, or conversation can make someone feel a part of the bluegrass family, then that's what I want to do. It's a family, and it's important that it stays that way, so that tradition continues."

Mrs. Hall was a Distinguished Achievement Award-winner from the International Bluegrass Music Association. She and her husband won the Grand Masters Gold prize from the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America, after notching 10 straight songwriters of the year awards.

Dixie Hall, left, accepts the Grammy award on the behalf of her husband, Tom T. Hall, for Best Album Notes during the champagne breakfast and the final 36 presentations of the Grammy awards at the Municipal Auditorium after the nationally televised show March 4, 1973.

"I was born in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and spent my whole life trying to get out of there," Tom T. Hall told Geoffrey Himes for a "New York Times" story. "Maybe our bluegrass songwriting works so well because we have such different views of Appalachia..... She can see the trees, while all I can see is the forest."

She saw the trees, and then planted some more. Mrs. Hall cultivated community, bringing hundreds of musicians together to record at her home, the Brentwood farm called "Fox Hollow." A recent "Daughters of Bluegrass" boxed set featured more than 100 women singing and playing bluegrass songs, with Tina Adair, Sierra Hull, Laurie Lewis, Fayssoux Starling McLean, Pam Tillis, Donna Ulisse and others performing numerous songs penned mostly by Mrs. Hall.

"When Dixie speaks, we walk," said Lorrie Bennett, a "Daughters" contributor and the granddaughter of Mrs. Hall's late and dear friend, Mother Maybelle Carter. "Dixie is a good person, she knows good people and she knows good music."

Born Iris Violet May Lawrence, Mrs. Hall was raised in England's West Midlands, near Manchester. Early on, she sought outside influences, winning a BBC poetry contest with a verse about Canada. She often watched cowboy movies, and rode horses herself.

"When I was 10, I wrote a poem about the west, and I submitted it to a program called "Children's Hour" on the BBC," Mrs. Hall said in a 2013 interview with "The Tennessean." "They had a poetry contest, and I won it and got to go to London to read the poem on the radio. That kind of triggered it for me."

Years later, she was set to take a train to London and she heard a deep, American voice saying, "Who are you, young lady, and what are you doing with a Stetson hat and a pair of boots?"

The voice was, to young Ms. Lawrence, familiar. It was cowboy movie star Tex Ritter. They rode in the train carriage to London, and Ritter said he'd love for his records to be released in Europe.

Tom T., right, and his wife, Dixie Hall, left, welcome the several hundred deejays individually as they arrive at the Hall's Fox Hollow home for a party Oct. 17, 1981. With the Halls is Lynn Waggoner of KEBC in Oklahoma City, who was voted the CMA's top major market deejay this year.

"I said, 'Oh, I'll take care of you,'" Mrs. Hall said. "I didn't at all know what I was doing, but I took some of his material over to EMI Records."

EMI released some Ritter material, and Nashville noticed. Don Pierce of Starday Records offered her a job in promotion and publicity, and in 1961 she took a ship to America. Before long, she was in Nashville, living with Mother Maybelle Carter of The Carter Family, country music's first superstar ensemble.

"The music the Carters made was the pure stuff," she said. "It was the origin, to me. And the family reached out and pulled me in."

With Maybelle, Mrs. Hall played "Don't Get Mad" and Canasta on many nights, sitting around the kitchen table. She answered the phone sometimes.

"Is Mother Maybelle there?" "No, I'm sorry." "She sure is a wonderful lady." "I'll tell her you called. What is your name?" "Bob Dylan."

There, she also watched Maybelle teach Earl Scruggs the guitar part to "You Are My Flower." Sometimes, she and Maybelle wrote songs, with Mrs. Hall writing under the name "Dixie Dean."

"Johnny Cash was chasing June at the time, and Maybelle loved him, and he'd stay with us when he was in town," Mrs. Hall said. "Once, I was at the table with a legal pad, working on a couple of songs that Maybelle and I had started, and John came in and started looking over my shoulder. He said, 'Mind if I look at that?' I said, 'No.' He looked at the songs, said, 'Hmmmm,' and as he was leaving he said, 'Those two songs, I want to record 'em. If I may.'"

She told Cash that'd be fine, and he did in fact record both "A Letter From Home" and "Troublesome Waters."

The legendary country songwriter Tom T. Hall and his wife, Dixie, are in the writing room and studio at their home in Franklin, Tenn. Sept. 29, 2007. He has become a popular bluegrass writer, and will be performing in the upcoming International Bluegrass Music Association's Fan Fest.

She also co-wrote Dave Dudley's hit "Truck Drivin' Son Of A Gun" with Ray King, a single backed by "I Got Lost," by a little-known writer named Tom Hall. The two met at the BMI Country Awards in Nashville in 1964. Later, "Tom Hall" would add the initial '"T" in the name of show business, and he and the former Iris Lawrence would build a life together.

For a time, she wrote for country music publications, including Faron Young's "Music City News." (She wound up as that magazine's editor.) She and Tom T. Hall married in March of 1968, and she set songwriting aside for many years. She focused on charity work, on raising and showing contest-ready Bassett Hounds, and on working with Nashville's Humane Society, helping that society raise more than one million dollars via various fundraisers.

"We raised all the money ourselves," she told Cardwell. "A lot of it was through making pickles and jellies and selling hundreds of thousands of jars at the lawn and garden show, the women's show, and Uncle Dave Macon Days, places like that."

In the 1990s, Tom T. Hall retired from a remarkable career, determined to set music aside. Mrs. Hall told him, "Music is too much of a treasure to throw it away."

"I kept on him," Mrs. Hall said in 2013. "And he finally said, 'If it's such a treasure and so easy to do, you do it."

So she did it.

Mother Maybelle Carter, second from right, pose with Dixie Hall, left, Hank Snow, and Johnny Cash, right, backstage after she receives an award as the Grand Ole Opry celebrates their 41st birthday party at the Ryman Auditorium Oct. 21, 1966.

Mrs. Hall wrote a handful of songs for bluegrass talent Nancy Moore, and Tom T. Hall then began contributing his own ideas. Newly enthused, Tom T. Hall finished a song called "Little Bitty," which wound up topping country charts after Alan Jackson recorded it. Jackson's success funded the renovation of the Halls' dog kennel into a state-of-the-art recording studio. And Mrs. Hall worked to turn newly created Blue Circle Records and Good Home Grown Music publishing into effective entities.

"She built this studio, started a publishing company and a record label," Tom T. Hall said. "She built the whole thing, while I was playing golf and mowing the grass."

Mrs. Hall sometimes kicked herself for not entering the bluegrass fray years earlier.

"Sometimes I think to myself, 'Oh, if I had another twenty years to write bluegrass songs, what could I do,'" Mrs. Hall told Cardwell. "But we got into it a little late. Just think, all those foolish years, frittered away on (Tom T. Hall country classics like) 'Homecoming' and 'Harper Valley (PTA).'"

Bluegrass artists gravitated to Mrs. Hall's songs, the ones she wrote herself and the ones she wrote with her husband.

"She's one of the most driven women I've ever met," Tom T. Hall said. "She would not take 'no' for an answer. She'd call people three times a day, tell them, 'We've got a song for you.' If they didn't want that one, she'd call them back with another."

Dixie Hall, center at the microphone, accepts the award for Best Recorded Event with other members of the Daughter of Bluegrass at the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards show Oct. 1, 2009.

When she wasn't pitching songs to others, Mrs. Hall wrote, voraciously. She wrote alone, with her husband and with friends including Jeanette Williams, Troy Engle and Billy Smith.

"Songwriting is an escape, a retreat and a haven for me," she told Cardwell. "It's somewhere to go. There's nothing like the feeling when a song's completed. You see what it is you've brought into the world. And then you have to let it go, and hope someone doesn't put drums on it."

Sometimes, Mrs. Hall didn't mind when someone put drums on her creations. She was particularly pleased with Miranda Lambert's 2014 version of "All That's Left," which the Halls wrote together. Featured on Lambert's CMA Album of the Year-winning "Platinum," "All That's Left" features swing band The Time Jumpers. Mrs. Hall called Lambert's recording "A blessing." More than a half-century after arriving in Nashville, Mrs. Hall was not only a bluegrass force, she was a contemporary country songwriter.

"She accomplished everything she wanted to accomplish in life," her husband said.

Mrs. Hall's favorite self-penned song was called "Let Me Fly Low." It's about a dying woman who begs to keep watch over her mate.

"Sad is the feeling, dreadful the grieving, when one remains and the other must go," she wrote. "It won't be Heaven without him beside me/ Please tell the angel, Lord, let me fly low."

Mrs. Hall wrote songs even as a brain tumor and other health woes took their toll. In late 2014, she released her first bluegrass single, a self-penned song called "Sunny Flower One."

"This song is my gift to you," she wrote, in a message that accompanied a free MP3 download of the song. "Running out of time here but it's your earth, and your music. Please save it and give generously. God bless you forevermore. I love you."

Mrs. Hall's funeral service will be private, though down the road Tom T. Hall expects to gather friends and fans for what he says will be "A cheerful and joyous celebration of her life and music."