Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 150

144

Popular Culture Review

“ 100 Children” has a ring almost like “We Shall Overcome,” as a listener imagines
crusading children marching down streets carrying signs and confronting jeering
police at barricades.
Hall pleads the children’s case for pure water and uncut forests, for praise
for the good, and for brotherhood. While his tone is hopeful here, it turns ominous
in “Mama Bake a Pie, Daddy Kill a Chicken. In this song, a young man returns
home legless to staring townspeople after doing his duty for the country in Viet
nam. Ironically he comments,
“And since I won’t be walking I suppose I’ll
save some money buying shoes.”
Hall made light of alcoholic beverages in “Day Drinking Again” in 1970,
much in the Nashville Tradition. But in 1973 he stepped well out of that tradition
with “Pay No Attention to Alice”. The song develops around the experiences of a
day in the household of an alcoholic, with food cooked from memory and reflex
and not coming out right, the car in a ditch, ashes everywhere and constant apolo
gies. While in the 1950s, songs such as Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass”
were censored by disc jockeys for presenting alcohol use negatively, by the time
he recorded “Alice” Hall had broken through such barriers, throwing realism di
rectly into the face of a naive, traditional Nashville:
Alice, put those ashes in the ashtray
I swear woman you’re going bum the house down
Pay no attention to Alice
They say she’s a sot
Sober she’s not
But it’s all that she got
The death penalty was not confronted in any explicit way on the Grand
Ole Opry stage; however, it gets Hall’s not so subtle treatment in “Turn it on. Turn
it on” (1982). The protagonist, a local “loser” who is constantly put down for
being an outsider, goes on a killing rampage as a means of committing suicide,
expecting to be killed during the rampage. Instead he is captured, and the state
obliges his suicide wish via the electric chair. A contemporary anti-gun message
seems hidden in the story line, as the character buys his bullets and immediately
kills the hardware store owner. Crime and punishment is also the focus of “Hang
‘em All” (1970)—a popular cry of many “law and order” enthusiasts. The trouble
is that “if they hang ‘em all, they going to hang you too.” Hall addressed the civil
rights issue as few in Nashville would risk doing. His “I Want to See the Parade”
(1970) strongly indicated that Nashville knew there was a civil rights problem in
America. Here Hall obliges a mother when she askes if he would hold her little girl