I have met or corresponded with many people affiliated with Tyson Foods, and I am extremely grateful to have made those connections.
Yet it is a person who I have actually never met who introduced me to the company.
There have been a lot of memorable television ads over the years, and to me, the Tyson chicken ads of of the early 1980s are among those.
The reason they stood out to me was that the spokesperson in those ads was Tom T. Hall, a famous country music singer-songwriter of the day, whose music appealed to both kids and adults.
Like most kids who were growing up in cattle country, I didn’t have any idea which were the top poultry companies at the time, and if I was asked to, I couldn’t have even named one.
Then, one night, when we were gathered around the TV set, Tom T. Hall came on and he was talking about how great Tyson chicken tasted. If Tom T. liked it, then it had to be good.
I was a fan of Hall’s music even before I knew who he was. To this day I can remember getting all excited whenever the song “Sneaky Snake” came over Dad’s A.M. radio. Then a year or two later when at a cousin’s house, I saw he had the Tom T. Hall record “Songs of Fox Hollow,” and “Sneaky Snake” was on there. I eventually got a copy of that album myself.
His catalogue of music is a great one. If you don’t know that song I earlier mentioned, you have perhaps heard “I Love,” “Faster Horses (The Cowboy and the Poet),” or “The Year Clayton Delaney Died.”
I love them all.
Tom T. Hall’s induction into hall of fame
The reason I chose now to blog about, or even think about, Hall, now 82, is that this past weekend, he and his late wife, Dixie, were inducted into the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame in Bean Blossom, Indiana.
So not only was he notable as a country music star, but as a bluegrass performer as well. Dixie was often her husband’s songwriting partner, but numerous songs she wrote without him were also recorded.
This was an honor well deserved.
