CMT Blog: Archive

Some songs you recommend because they have an emotional hold on you and some because they’re just so damn well written. Tom T. Hall’s “Homecoming” rises out of the latter category. Although it became a Top 5 hit for Hall in 1969, the song isn’t one you’ll likely go around humming. It has no hook to make it memorable, no chorus to pound home a message, no story in any conventional sense of the word and only the most rudimentary of melodies. If you aren’t paying attention to the words, it will probably sound numbingly monotonous. But it’s a masterpiece of character observation –- the best, I think, in all of country music.

“Homecoming” is a dramatic monologue. As you may recall from your basic lit classes, that’s the poetic form in which a person reveals himself while he’s talking about something else. The example used most often to illustrate the technique is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” In that poem, the duke pauses at a portrait of his late wife to tell a guest (who didn’t ask) what it was about the departed that most displeased him. “She had a heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere.” In taking offense at traits most of us would cherish, the duke shows himself to be vain, cold and controlling, a thorough scoundrel.

The speaker in “Homecoming” is a down-on-his-luck country singer who, after years of absence, has finally returned (or, more accurately, dropped by) home to visit his father. His nervous chatter, weak attempts at humor, endless excuses for avoiding family obligations and reflexive lying mark him as a complete moral bankrupt. His presence verges on the unbearable. The more he talks, the more we wish he would just get into his car and drive away. You know the type. Hall knows him inside out.

The niceties of copyright prevent me from reproducing “Homecoming” here, but you can look it up on Google. Do that and then tell me if there’s anything on radio today that touches it.