According to Tom T. Hall, his 1968 hit, “Ballad Of 40 Dollars” was a hard song to title! Tom T. said, “The idea for that song came from the observation of a small town funeral. And the song deals with hypocrisy too, because people pretend to be sad and downhearted when someone dies.  But the fellow in the truck who's reciting the conversational song is looking at the situation much like someone who's seeing such a tragedy outside his family and he’s having real honest feelings and thoughts.”

“The song is sort of a confession of a real human being of this day and age, watching a funeral procession. Like his thoughts of ‘I wonder who’s going to get that truck;’ ‘I wonder what his finances were;’ and the fact that the guy has to go back to work but he says in the song, that he would go and see the man put down, but he doesn’t own a suit.”

“So, this is the big line in the song because he doesn’t feel that he belongs to that class of people.  It’s too bad that one of them died but he has his own troubles and he doesn't have a suit and that's the thing that’s really bothering him, and not the fact that the guy died and is being buried.”

Tom T. added, “So the song has a message, but I don’t know if it came off like that to very many people.  But I have known several people like that fellow who sat in that truck like he does in the song.  And those people seem to be happier people because they don’t pretend to be something they're not. They’re just real people.”

He concluded, “The guy doesn’t say a thing disrespectful and he hopes the dead guy rests in peace, but the trouble is the dead guy owes him forty bucks! One of my jobs as a kid was working in a cemetery mowing around the tombstones.  You start thinking about all those folks that are gone and you begin to get an attitude toward it.”

“Ballad Of Forty Dollars” was Tom T. Hall’s 4th chart single. It entered the country music charts November 16th, 1968 and peaked at # 4. It was on the charts for 18 weeks.

Doug Davis
Country Music Classics