Tom Hall
Tom Hall in 2003
Born	(1964-09-02) September 2, 1964 (age 47)
Occupation	Game designer, Game programmer
Employer	Loot Drop
Spouse	Terri Hall
Website
TOMTOMTOM.com

Tom A. Hall (born September 2, 1964) is a game designer born in Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he received a B.S. in Computer Science. In 1987, he worked at Softdisk Inc., where he was both a programmer and the editor of Softdisk, a software bundle delivered monthly. Along with some of his co-workers, John Carmack, John Romero and Adrian Carmack, he founded id Software. He served as creative director and designer there, working on games such as the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, and Doom.

After some disputes with John Carmack about the design for Doom and the amount of gore and violence, he left to join Apogee/3D Realms. He was the game designer for Rise of the Triad, produced Terminal Velocity, and helped in varying degrees on Duke Nukem II and Duke Nukem 3D as well. He also worked on the Prey engine until August 12, 1996, when he left Apogee.

Next Hall co-founded Ion Storm with John Romero, where he produced Anachronox. The company also produced the 2000 Game of the Year, Deus Ex,^[1] in which Hall voiced one of the characters. He and John then founded Monkeystone Games, a company with the goal of producing mobile games in the then-nascent mobile industry.^[2] He designed, and Romero programmed, Hyperspace Delivery Boy!, which was released on December 23, 2001. He and Romero joined Midway Games in 2003, and Monkeystone closed in January 2005. Hall also left Midway early that year and did independent game consultation work out of Austin, TX, until in February he joined a startup company called KingsIsle Entertainment based in the same area. Tom left Kingsisle and joined Loot Drop on January 1, 2011.^[3]

Dopefish[link]

Hall is also the creator of the Dopefish, a large, green, buck-toothed, belching, dimwitted fish whose thought process is restricted to "Swim, swim, hungry". The Dopefish first appeared in Commander Keen episode IV, and references to it have appeared in many other video games since.^[4]

Voice work[link]

Hall provided the following voices for the computer role-playing game Deus Ex: Morpheus, a sentient AI; Howard Strong, a ruthless and cruel MJ12 operative; and Walton Simons, the nano-augmented Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He also voiced the project director in Deus Ex: Invisible War's opening cutscene, and PAL-18, Councilman Willis, Dr. Hush-Hush and Eddie the Chew in Anachronox. He was also the voice of the main antagonist of Rise of the Triad, El Oscuro, as well as the Death Monk enemies from the game.^[5]

Stroke[link]

Hall suffered a stroke on Tuesday, April 13, 2010. He was in rehab until April 21, when he was released.^[6]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tom Hall

• Hall's personal website
• MobyGames' entry on Hall
• Hall's Twitter page

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2011)

Thomas "Tom T." Hall (born May 25, 1936, in Olive Hill, Kentucky) is an American country music singer-songwriter. He has written 11 #1 hit songs, with 26 more that reached the Top 10, including the #1 international pop crossover smash "Harper Valley PTA" and the hit "I Love", which reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100. He became known to fans as "The Storyteller," thanks to his storytelling skills in his songwriting.

Biography[link]

As a teenager, Hall organized a band called the Kentucky Travelers that performed before movies for a traveling theater. During a stint in the Army, Hall performed over the Armed Forces Radio Network and wrote comic songs about Army experiences. His early career included being a radio announcer at WRON, a local radio station in Ronceverte, West Virginia. Hall was also an announcer at WVRC Radio in Spencer, West Virginia in the 1960s.

Hall's big songwriting break came in 1963, when country singer Jimmy C. Newman recorded his song, "DJ For a Day." Soon, Hall moved to Nashville, and within months, he had songs climbing the charts. Hall has been nicknamed "The Story Teller," and he has written songs for dozens of country stars, including Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Alan Jackson, and Bobby Bare.

One of his earliest successful songwriting ventures, "Harper Valley PTA," was recorded in 1968 by Jeannie C. Riley, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard Country Music Chart at the same time, sold over six million copies, and won both a Grammy Award and CMA award. The song would go on to inspire a motion picture and television program of the same name. Hall himself has recorded this song, on his album The Definitive Collection (as track #23). Hall's recording career took off after Ms. Riley's rendition of the song, and he had such hits as "A Week in a Country Jail," "(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine," "I Love," "Country Is," "The Year Clayton Delaney Died," "I Like Beer," "Faster Horses (the Cowboy and the Poet)", and many others. He is also noted for his children-oriented songs, including "Sneaky Snake" and "I Care," the latter of which hit #1 on the country charts in 1975.

Hall won the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes in 1973 for the notes he wrote for his album Tom T. Hall's Greatest Hits. He was nominated for, but did not win, the same award in 1976 for his album Greatest Hits, Volume 2.

He also hosted the syndicated country music TV show Pop! Goes the Country in 1980.

His 1996 song "Little Bitty", from the album Songs from Sopchoppy, became a #1 single that year when it was recorded by Alan Jackson for the album Everything I Love.

In 1998, his 1972 song "Old Dogs and Children and Watermelon Wine" came in second in a BBC Radio 2 poll to find the UK's favorite easy listening record, despite never having been a hit in the UK and being familiar to Radio 2 listeners mostly through occasional plays by DJ Terry Wogan.^[1]

His song "I Love", in which the narrator lists the things in life that he loves, was used, with altered lyrics, in a popular 2003 TV commercial for Coors Light.^[2]

On July 3, 2007, he released the CD Tom T. Hall Sings Miss Dixie & Tom T. on his independent bluegrass label Blue Circle Records.

On February 12, 2008, Hall was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Discography[link]

Books written by Hall[link]

• How I Write Songs, Why You Can (1976), Chappell Music Co.
• The Songwriter's Handbook (1976), Rutledge Hill Press
• The Storyteller's Nashville (1979), Doubleday & Co.
• The Laughing Man of Woodmont Coves (1982), Doubleday & Co.
• The Acts of Life (1986), The University Of Arkansas Press
• Homewords (1986), The University of Tennessee Press
• Christmas and the Old House (1989), Peachtree Publishers, Ltd.
• Spring Hill, Tennessee (1990), Longstreet Press, Inc.
• What a Book! (1996), Longstreet Press, Inc.

See also[link]

• Category:Songs written by Tom T. Hall
• Category:Tom T. Hall songs
• Category:Tom T. Hall albums

References[link]

• Allen, Bob. (1998). "Tom T. Hall". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 224–5.

External links[link]

• Tom T. Hall official website
• Tom T. Hall page at allmusic.com
• Blue Circle Records
• Good Home Grown Music Publishing
• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (September 2007)

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Robert Joseph "Bobby" Bare (born April 7, 1935, Ironton, OH) is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is the father of Bobby Bare, Jr., also a musician.

Early career[link]

Bare had many failed attempts to sell his songs in the 1950s.^{[citation needed]} He finally signed with Capitol Records and recorded a few rock and roll songs without much chart success.^{[citation needed]} Just before he was drafted into the Army, he wrote a song called "The All American Boy" and did a demo for his friend, Bill Parsons, to learn and record. Instead of using the version Bill Parsons did later, the record company, Fraternity Records, decided to use the original demo recorded by Bobby Bare. The record reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, but they made an error: the singles' labels all credited the artist as being "Bill Parsons." ^[1][2] The same track, with the same billing error, peaked at #22 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1959.^[3]

Career at RCA (1962–1970)[link]

Bare's big break in country music came when RCA Records' Chet Atkins signed him. The first song he released on the label was "Shame On Me" in 1962. His second RCA release, "Detroit City," was his first top-ten Country single, reaching number six.^[2] It also hit number 16 on the pop charts.^[1] In 1964, he also received a Grammy Award for Best Country and Western Recording for the song Detroit City. Then a surge of hits followed, including "500 Miles Away from Home" (based on a traditional folk ballad written by Hedy West as "500 Miles")^[1] and Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." In 1965 he received two Grammy nominations for Best Country & Western Vocal Performance and Best Country & Western single for the song “Four Strong Winds”. In 1966, he received a Grammy Nomination for Best Country & Western Male Vocal Performance for his song “Talk Me Some Sense”. He also recorded with Skeeter Davis, Norma Jean and Liz Anderson. "The Game of Triangles", a wife-husband-other woman drama that hit number five on the Billboard chart earned the trio a Grammy nomination. In 1968, he recorded an album with a group from England called The Hillsiders.^{[citation needed][4]} In 1969, he had a Top 5 hit with Tom T. Hall's "(Margie's At) The Lincoln Park Inn".^[2]

Career at Mercury (1970–1972)[link]

Bare moved to Mercury Records in 1970 and immediately scored a Top 3 hit with "How I Got To Memphis" and had two Top 10 hits from early Kris Kristofferson compositions, "Come Sundown" (1971) and "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends," (1971).^[2] He also scored a #12 hit in 1972 with a version of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show's pop hit "Sylvia's Mother", written by Shel Silverstein.

Second career at RCA (1973–1977)[link]

After a couple of years at Mercury, Bobby returned to RCA Records in 1973 and scored with Billy Joe Shaver's "Ride Me Down Easy" which nearly made the Top 10.

Bobby Bare started to release novelty songs recorded live with selected audiences. One such song, "Marie Laveau," reached the number one position on the country chart in 1974; it was his only number one hit. This song was co-written by his friends Shel Silverstein and Baxter Taylor, who received a BMI Award for the song in 1975.

Silverstein penned other songs for Bare including a Grammy-nominated hit, "Daddy What If," which he recorded with his five-year-old son, Bobby Bare, Jr. The song was an immediate success as well not only reaching #2 on the country charts but nearly reaching the Top 40 on the Pop charts. Bare's album, "Lullabys, Legends and Lies" became his most commercially successful album and Bobby had a new audience with pop radio once again playing his songs and a new following with college kids. These two songs, however, would become Bobby's last Top 10 hits. Bare later recorded a very successful album with his family, written mainly by Silverstein, called "Singin' in The Kitchen." It was nominated for best group category in Grammy Awards, but was declined by Bobby himself.^{[citation needed]} He continued to record critically acclaimed albums and singles. His biggest hits during this time included "Alimony" (1975), "The Winner" (1976), and "Drop Kick Me Jesus (Through The Goalposts Of Life)" (the world's only Christian-football waltz, and a 1976 Grammy nominee^{[citation needed]}). In 1977 he recorded "Redneck Hippie Romance"^{[citation needed]} and "Vegas" (a duet with his wife Jeannie).

Concept albums were nothing new for Bobby, In 1967, Bare came up with a concept album called "Bird Named Yesterday," which was very successful.^{[citation needed]} His most successful concept album is "Lullabys, Legends and Lies". He also is the first to be given full control of his work and thus the very first Outlaw.^{[citation needed]}

Career at Columbia Records (1978–1983)[link]

Bobby signed with Columbia Records and continued to have hits like "Sleep Tight Good Night Man" a near Top 10 in 1978 and releasing critically acclaimed albums like "Bare" and "Sleeper Wherever I Fall". In 1979, he started off Rosanne Cash's career in a big way by singing a duet with her called "No Memories Hangin' Round" which went Top 20 for them. In 1980, he scored a near Top 10 with "Numbers" which came from his album "Down and Dirty" where Bare started to experiment with Southern rock and continued this with his next album "Drunk and Crazy". In 1981, Bobby released an album entitled "As Is" which was produced by Rodney Crowell and returned Bobby back to his country roots with songs like "New Cut Road". Bare was still doing well chartwise into the early 1980s. In 1983, he released a Top 30 duet with Lacy J. Dalton called "It's A Dirty Job". His last trip into the Top 30 came that summer with the novelty song "The Jogger".

Eurovision 2012[link]

On 4 February 2012, Bobby joined up with Petter Øien at the 2012 Melodi Grand Prix to choose the entry for Norway's entry to the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in May. His song, "Things Change", got through to the Norwegian final, held on 11 February 2012. In the final he finished third.

Film career[link]

Bobby Bare was also given an opportunity to star in the movies. He acted in a Western with Troy Donahue, A Distant Trumpet, and a few episodes of the TV series No Time for Sergeants. He turned his back on Hollywood to pursue his career in country music.

Later career in country music and today[link]

From 1983 to 1988, Bobby hosted Bobby Bare and Friends on The Nashville Network which featured Bobby interviewing songwriters who sang their hit songs on the show.

In 1985, Bobby signed with EMI America Records where he scored 3 charted singles, but none of these reached the upper regions of the charts.

In 1998, he formed the band, Old Dogs, with his friends Jerry Reed, Mel Tillis and Waylon Jennings.

In 2005, he recorded a new album after over 20 years, called The Moon Was Blue, produced^[5] by his son Bobby Bare, Jr., who is also a musician. He continues to tour today.

In nearly 50 years of making music, Bobby has made many firsts in country music. Bare is credited for introducing Waylon Jennings to RCA.^{[citation needed]} He is also one of the first to record from many well- known song writers such as Jack Clement, Harlan Howard, Billy Joe Shaver, Mickey Newbury, Tom T. Hall, Shel Silverstein, Baxter Taylor and Kris Kristofferson.^{[citation needed]}

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

Singles[link]