Culture Archives - Margaret Renkl

An Open Letter to John Lewis
The New York Times, 6 January 2020

Dear Mr. Lewis, I write with a heavy heart. Stage 4 pancreatic cancer is a brutal diagnosis, so it’s no surprise that last Sunday night the internet erupted with anguish as news of your illness became public. Treatment may give you a “fighting chance” to continue working “for the Beloved Community,” as you wrote in a statement, but it’s painful to think of what you will be called on to bear in the coming months. You have already borne so much for us. (more….)

Country Music as Melting Pot
The New York Times, 9 September 2019

Last spring at the Ryman Auditorium, sitting in the audience for a concert filmed to celebrate the new documentary series by Ken Burns, I couldn’t help but notice that the folks around me didn’t look much like the usual bro-country fans swarming Nashville these days. Just who exactly was this documentary aiming to reach? All of us, it turns out. People of every age, every political persuasion, every socio-economic class, every race. The goal of “Country Music” is nothing less than to remind us of who we really are. (more….)

Let’s Hear It for the Average Child
The New York Times, 31 May 2019

Parents, we ask you to hold your applause until the names of all the medal winners have been announced. When the ceremony is over and your child has not left her seat, please take a few moments to congratulate the winners as they head off to their well-earned celebrations. Then we ask that you return to your seats. We have a few special achievements left to acknowledge. (more….)

Waking Up to History
The New York Times, 1 April 2019

Like many girls of my generation in the rural South, I learned every form of handwork my grandmother or great-grandmother could teach me: sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting. I even learned to tat, a kind of handwork done with a tiny shuttle that turns thread into lace. Some of my happiest memories are of sitting on the edge of my great-grandmother’s bed, our heads bent together as she pulled out my mangled stitches. (more….)

The Day the Music Died
The New York Times, 21 January 2019

I am not a musician, or even an aspiring musician, but I moved to Nashville in 1987 because of music. One of my college roommates was in graduate school at Vanderbilt and invited me to visit, and my grad school boyfriend tagged along. Haywood is a picker himself, and he expected to fall in love with Music City; he even packed his résumé. (more….)

John Prine: American Oracle
The New York Times, 22 October 2018

Nine songs into his sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium here on Oct. 5, John Prine stopped singing long enough to give some context for a song he wrote 50 years ago, during the height of the Vietnam War. “I wrote this next one as a protest song,” he said. “It was 1968, and at the time we had a real jerk in the White House.” He paused before voicing what I was already thinking: “What a coincidence.” (more….)

Keep America’s Roadside Weird
The New York Times, 25 August 2018

My husband and I were driving down I-65, still in Tennessee but near the Alabama border, when the statue of a giant chicken caught my eye. It was standing in front of a truck stop near Elkton. I am grateful to be married to a man who will instantly pull off the highway when someone says, “Hey, let’s take a selfie with that chicken!” (more….)

What’s a Southern Writer Anyway?
The New York Times, 9 July 2018

From time to time, a debate resurfaces in Southern literary circles about whether there can still be a recognizable literature of the South in an age of mass media and Walmart. The 21st-century South would be unrecognizable to the Agrarian poets, whose 1930 manifesto, “I’ll Take My Stand,” set out many of the principles that still cling like ticks to the term “Southern writer.” (more….)

Going to Church With Jimmy Carter
The New York Times, 16 April 2018

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I pulled into the parking lot of the Quality Inn in Americus, Ga., last Saturday night. It was long past dark but I could see well enough to note the out-of-state license plates — New Mexico, Pennsylvania, California, Alaska — places far from this peanut-farming land. (more….)

A Monument the Old South Would Like to Ignore
The New York Times, 29 January 2018

In 1978, the city of Nashville leased 18 acres of a Civil War monument to a local businessman who wanted to start a new baseball franchise — the Nashville Sounds, then a Double A expansion team for the Southern League — and needed a place for his team to play. It was a ludicrous arrangement from the start: a privately owned ball field built on public land. And not just any public land. Greer Stadium was built at the base of St. Cloud Hill, where the Union Army erected a stronghold after taking control of the city in 1862. (more….)