There aren’t bad Tom T. Hall studio albums, but this career-spanning compilation shows the prolific, singular country songwriter’s range—his ability to convey humor or heartbreak (or both), his understated poetry, his ear for unlikely hits. The Olive Hill, Kentucky native anticipated some of the bold storytelling of the outlaw movement with his sharply observed rebukes of hypocrisy, the most famous being his 1968 breakout hit as a writer, Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” His own catalog, though, includes a number of even more pointed political barbs: On Hall’s first single, “I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew,” he sings about how “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and to me it didn’t seem right.” His skill, though, was including that general sensitivity to the society around him in his songs, whether they were explicitly statement-making or not. Hall told other people’s stories more than his own, whether they were rooted in his travels as a musician, like the No. 1 hit “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine”; his rural youth, like “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died”; or his imagination, as “Faster Horses (The Cowboy and the Poet).” Too straightlaced to earn recognition as an outlaw himself, Hall nevertheless hung with Nashville’s more rebellious singer-songwriters, as evidenced here by his takes on two Billy Joe Shaver songs and the memorable “Spokane Motel Blues,” which finds him name-checking a litany of other subversion-oriented songwriters. Hall rarely got credit for his whimsy, and was derided for lighthearted hits like “That Song Is Driving Me Crazy,” “I Like Beer,” and “I Love” (which does not appear in this collection) that were deemed frivolous and cynical by contemporary critics. Nor is he much praised as a vocalist—yet his rendition of one of his most enduring and most covered compositions, “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” is hard to match. Most impressive, perhaps, is the fact that very few Tom T. Hall songs are alike, and they’re also not much like any other country song you’ve ever heard—as good a case as any for listening to dozens of them.