The most astonishing chapter at Fox Hollow did not begin with a hit record or a crowded tour bus. It began when the road finally went quiet and Dixie Hall picked up her pen again with the urgency of a woman determined to recover every lost year.
During the final eighteen years of her life she took part in an estimated three thousand bluegrass songs. For fourteen straight years she and Tom T. Hall were named songwriters of the year by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America. The celebrated Storyteller had not slipped into silence after leaving full time touring in the mid 1990s. He had stepped into his wife second career.
The farm simply had to wait until the road released her husband
Long before she became known as Tom T. wife, she was Iris Violet May Lawrence, a ten year old girl in England writing a poem about the American West she had never seen. The poem won a BBC children competition and she traveled to London to read it on the radio. That early glimpse of recognition hinted at the creative life she would chase across an ocean.
As a young woman she worked as a trick rider in British Wild West shows and wrote for country music publications in Britain. A chance meeting with Tex Ritter on a London train pulled her deeper into the American music world and Ritter became one of the established artists who encouraged her journey.
Don Pierce of Starday Records offered her work in Nashville and she crossed the Atlantic to build a place for herself in Music City. She promoted records, worked in publicity and became deeply involved with Music City News. She was never standing at the edge of the business watching other people move. She was helping songs find their audience.
She was also writing her own songs. Her work on โTruck Drivinโ Son-of-a-Gunโ became a hit for Dave Dudley and earned BMI recognition. That honor carried her to the BMI awards banquet alongside Mother Maybelle Carter.
Tom T. Hall was in that same room for a beautifully unlikely reason. His composition โI Got Lostโ sat on the opposite side of the very same single. Their names were linked on vinyl before their lives were linked in marriage and they wed on March 16, 1968.
His rise came swiftly after that. Jeannie C. Riley carried his โHarper Valley P.T.A.โ to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts. His own string of memorable records followed with โA Week in a Country Jailโ and โThe Year That Clayton Delaney Diedโ and โI Loveโ and โFaster Horses.โ Nashville crowned him the Storyteller while Dixie name faded from public view.
The couple settled on sixty seven acres south of Nashville at Fox Hollow. Dixie raised basset hounds and opened her heart to strays until the farm at times held around fifty dogs along with other animals including peacocks. The property felt less like a private retreat and more like a small settlement built on compassion.
Through Animaland and homemade preserves and pickles and charity dinners hosted in their home she helped raise more than one million dollars for the Nashville Humane Association. She was not idly waiting through the peak years of her husband career. She was building another world of responsibility around the home they shared.
When Tom T. stepped back from the demands of mainstream country music the rhythm that had shaped their marriage changed completely. Concert dates no longer pulled him away for long stretches and radio timetables no longer dictated his writing. In that new quiet Dixie returned to the music that had first drawn her from England to Nashville.
Bluegrass had always lived at the center of her story through her love for the sounds connected to Mother Maybelle Carter and the Stanley Brothers. This time she pulled Tom T. toward her world. The direction of influence inside the marriage had reversed and her unfinished creative life began to give his retirement its structure and purpose.
Three thousand songs cannot be explained by a sudden flash of inspiration. That number speaks of discipline and devotion and the simple powerful act of sitting down day after day to finish the work. Dixie second act was not a gentle hobby for later years. It was a full creative campaign built one song at a time.
Fox Hollow grew into a working music center with a professional recording studio and publishing and recording operations that included Good Home Grown Music and Blue Circle Records. The Halls used that foundation to lift bluegrass performers both seasoned and new.
Dixie gave particular care to women whose talent might vanish inside a male dominated field. Her Daughters of Bluegrass projects gathered female writers and musicians together and several of those albums earned International Bluegrass Music Association honors. For Nancy Moore 1999 album โLocal Flowersโ Dixie served as producer and every song was written or co written by Dixie or Tom T.
She had traveled an extraordinary distance from the young promoter helping other people records move through Nashville in the 1960s. Now she was creating the conditions that allowed overlooked artists to make records of their own.
In a 1965 interview given long before Fox Hollow and long before her marriage she had shared a modest dream for her future.
Earn enough royalties to buy a little farm in the hills where she could remain and write songs
She found the farm early enough. The uninterrupted writing life took far longer to arrive because the years filled with touring schedules and animals needing shelter and charity work and the daily labor of a country music household. None of that time was empty yet the dream she spoke as a young woman never disappeared.
Dixie died in January 2015 and by then Fox Hollow held proof of far more than Tom T. Hall famous years. Its studio and publishing files preserved the long delayed creative life of the English girl who crossed an ocean for music and refused to let her own voice remain a footnote.
Tom T. Hall built his legend by noticing people whose stories were easily overlooked. At Fox Hollow the woman beside him finally claimed the time to finish her own sentences and she filled that time with songs that will keep singing for her.