WHEN TOM T. HALL WROTE ABOUT HIS BOYHOOD HERO, HE CHANGED THE MAN’S NAME BUT REFUSED TO MOVE HIM OFF HIS OWN HILL. The hero was Lonnie Easterly, a guitar picker outside Olive Hill, Kentucky, who lived on Clayton Hill next door to a family called the Delaneys. Hall built the invented name out of the hill and the neighbors. He said he did it so he would not have to move the geography around and lose the reality of what he was writing about. Easterly never made the move to Tennessee. He died while Hall was still a boy, more than twenty years before the song existed, and the Country Music Hall of Fame credits his tutelage as what shaped Hall’s earliest playing. By the time “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” spent two weeks at No. 1 in September 1971 and crossed onto the pop chart at No. 42, Hall was a Nashville songwriter, a recording artist and a brand-new Grand Ole Opry member — everything the older man had wanted and missed. Then, in 1978, Hall wrote a sequel. “Son of Clayton Delaney” drops the narrator into a Louisville bar watching a long-haired kid play electric guitar, and the kid turns out to be the picker’s son. That one charted too. A man who never left Kentucky is in the country charts twice, both times under a name that was never his.
Tom T. Hall and the Boyhood Hero He Never Moved Some country songs feel invented from the first line. Others…