In the South, the school year typically begins in August. By now, the fried-chicken family reunions have come and gone, and the beach trips are fading from memory. And yet, here in the deepest heat of summer, the urge to get out of the city is more powerful than ever. Away from the shadeless streets. Away from the noise. Away from even the ordinarily friendly people, all of them irritable, as tired of the heat and the noise as you are.
So when I got an email from the country artist Tyler Childers — or at least from his marketing team — informing me of a “top secret pop-up show” to be held five days later somewhere in central Kentucky, I promptly registered for the drawing that would determine who could buy tickets.
Apparently, I inadvertently joined this mailing list when I preordered a vinyl copy of “Snipe Hunter,” Mr. Childers’s latest record, but I was thrilled to have a shot at buying those tickets. I figured my odds of getting them fell somewhere between low and subterranean — there was room for only 500 people, and Mr. Childers routinely sells out arenas and stadiums — but it was worth a try. A road trip through soybeans and cornfields to see one of my favorite country artists struck me as pretty good recompense for the dog days. In a time when so many country songs are written by committee, Mr. Childers is a one-of-a-kind original — an audacious, innovative songwriter who sings his heart out onstage.
One of the best things about having something to look forward to is having something to look forward to, but there is no anticipation involved in most pop-up concerts. There you are, eating your lunch, and suddenly Tyler Childers is standing in your favorite East Nashville sandwich shop, as he was last week, singing every track on his new record.
It’s hard not to love a pop-up show. The unexpected delight of it. The unearned gift of it. The Oh-My-God-I-Thought-It-Was-Nothing-But-A-Downhill-Slog-Till-Christmas-And-Yet-Look-Here-At-This of it. Suddenly there’s a rift in the ordinary, an interruption of patterns that makes you understand how miraculous the ordinary really is, how capricious its imaginary patterns.
I couldn’t believe it when I got the text telling me I’d hit the ticket lottery. I am just about the luckiest person I know, but for a lot of reasons, mostly existential, I stopped feeling lucky a while back. Here was a bit of luck I’d hardly had the heart to hope for.
The concert venue, finally announced on the day of the concert, was Dinosaur World. Driving straight up I-65 from Nashville, you can’t miss it; just off the exit to Cave City, Ky., a massive statue of a T-Rex looms over the highway. Another bit of luck! This was not going to be an ordinary pop-up concert. This was going to be a very weird pop-up concert.
Passing signs for souvenir and fireworks vendors and a haunted hotel, my husband and I found a place to park on the grass just outside the Dinosaur Valley RV Park, where the handmade sign marked “Event Parking $20” was painted over with a new price. That night they were charging double, presumably owing to the influx of Mr. Childers’s fans.
But judging by all the Kentucky tags, this was mostly a hometown crowd, people who came to hear a redheaded boy from the holler sing about the world they live in. Everybody there was in love with Tyler Childers. And Tyler Childers, who for the whole concert kept thanking the crowd for standing beside him all these years, loved them right back.
There were tatted-up 20-somethings in cowboy boots and T-shirts emblazoned with messages like, “Here for the Hillbilly Music.” There were old women in ruffles, dabbing their faces with handkerchiefs. There were young families, toddlers perched on their fathers’ shoulders and nursing infants attached to their mothers’ breasts. And all of us had puffed our way up a dirt trail in the hallucinogenic heat to a stage set up at the foot of the T-Rex statue. “Sweat’s already running down my legs like I peed on myself,” one woman said to another. Good thing each ticket came with a free snow cone.
“Welcome to the most magical place on the side of a highway!” Mr. Childers said when he and his band, The Food Stamps, made it to the stage.
But the magic wasn’t in the weirdness of a concert held in the shadow of a manufactured T-Rex. The magic was in the happiness of that crowd and in the music itself — the sweet songs and the rocking songs and the searching songs and the funny songs. (The chorus of “Bitin’ List” ends, “And if there ever come a time I got rabies / You’re high on my bitin’ list.) The magic was in the love flowing back and forth between the people on the stage and the people standing in the dirt just past the stage.
Mr. Childers is not afraid to speak out on social issues. The music video for “In Your Love” tells a gay love story. He has stopped performing “Feathered Indians,” an early song and fan favorite, and he donates the song’s royalties to Indigenous communities. Last month, as ICE roundups were taking place in Los Angeles, he performed “Long Violent History” live for the first time. It’s a protest song he wrote in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
This empathetic fearlessness is one of the reasons Mr. Childers is a rarity among country artists. As the music journalist Marissa R. Moss notes in a long, brilliant profile for GQ, “What makes Childers one of the most important country artists of his generation is that he won’t conform or compromise, and every step of his career is about building a song, or a life, that both respects tradition but seeks expansion, not exclusion.”
But “Snipe Hunter,” Mr. Childers’ recent album, is a 13-track record of a spiritually searching and artistically innovative mind, not any sort of overt commentary on social injustice. As we made our way back down the highway to Nashville, I wondered aloud about that choice. I admit I had been hoping for a few words from Mr. Childers on this time of flagrant injustices. These days, it’s hard not to feel awfully lonely in the world.
But my husband reminded me of the speech William Faulkner gave when he won the 1950 Nobel Prize. Acknowledging the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, Mr. Faulkner argued that the writer must nevertheless keep his focus on “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
It’s a good point, one that Mr. Childers is in no danger of forgetting. And maybe what we all need more than anything in this hot summer of our waning democracy is something like a joyful pop-up concert in the shadow of a fake T-Rex. A chance to stand under the trees in the dirt and do a little bit of dancing and a little bit of singing and a whole lot of laughing. Maybe what we need most right now is a chance to hum all the way home in the dark.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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