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This is the best, best-known, and best-selling song ever written by Tom T. Hall, who died last week. It’s also the only hit for Jeannie C. Riley.

A one-hit wonder that sold six million copies, it’s a story about smalltown intolerance and hypocrisy, about a widow whose teenage daughter gets told off by the Parent Teachers Associiation for drinking, running around with boys and wearing her dresses “way too high” at school.

Telling her how to raise her daughter doesn’t go down well with Mrs Johnson, who decides to pay an unannounced visit to the PTA meeting that afternoon, exposing a long list of indiscretions on the part of the members there.

Bobby Taylor seems to have been sufficiently aroused by Mrs Johnson’s miniskirt to invite her on a date seven times – despite having a wife who enjoys receiving gentleman callers herself – while Mr Baker’s secretary has had to leave town suddenly for reasons that we can only infer.

Then there’s widow Jones, who leaves her window blinds open for peeping toms to admire her as she undresses, Shirley Thompson who has gin on her breath, and Mr Harper himself, whose absence from the meeting is because “he stayed too long at Kelly’s Bar again.”

In the final verse, the singer states that the story is true and in the final line she identifies herself as the daughter of Mrs Johnson, her birth being “the day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA.”

Tom T. Hall said it was based on his experiences as a child in Kentucky in the mid-1940s when a classmate’s mother was censured by the school board for her licentious ways and gave them a tongue-lashing when they started taking it out on her daughter.

Jeannie C. Riley was working as a secretary in Nashville when she heard the song and recorded a demo that ended up being an international sensation. She never had another hit, not even with a sequel recorded in 1984, though Tom T. Hall had 12 number ones across his career.

RIP Tom T. Hall