In 1974, tucked away on Side B of Tom T. Hall’s album *Songs of Fox Hollow*, there’s a song called “Margie’s At The Lincoln Park Inn.” It’s a country tune that never quite became an anthem, nor did it make the leap to jukebox immortality. But for reasons tied to heartache, guilt, and the longing for something simpler, it has always haunted me—more than any Johnny Cash standard or Willie Nelson ode.
The premise is quietly devastating. The narrator, a married man, confesses in the plainest terms about his infidelity:
*”Tomorrow she’ll be back at the Lincoln Park Inn,
And my mind will be clouded with thoughts of her again.”*
It’s the simplicity that floors me. Hall, as always, doesn’t need big words to slice a heart open. This isn’t a song that glorifies cheating or casts blame; it’s about the struggle between temptation and the domestic roles we inhabit. Sometimes, life in the slow lanes of the countryside—or even the curving roads of Helmond—has a way of forcing you inward, to face your own darkness.
For a long time, I thought of myself as the reliable husband, the family man generous with affection and predictable in my routines. But this song made me look in the mirror and ask whether reliability was just the mask I wore to hide my disappointments, my small betrayals of self. It took me back to an afternoon in 1983, after a storm had swept through our part of the Netherlands and left the fields soggy and the air thick as wool. My wife was in the kitchen, humming as she kneaded dough with a patience I have never quite possessed. I remember standing in the hallway, listening to Tom T. Hall’s heavy Kentucky drawl on my battered old Philips radio:
*”There’s a room at the Lincoln Park Inn, where my sweet Margie waits…”*
Suddenly, my home was no haven. I felt like a stranger in my own skin, not because I ever strayed, but because I recognized the impulse—the ache for someone, or something, outside the lines I’d drawn for myself. We like to think of country songs as simple tales, but this melody—gentle as Sunday at dawn, lyrics as sharp as gravel—dragged my hidden yearning straight into daylight.
You see, country music is as much about what’s unsaid as what’s confessed. The line that stings most isn’t even the one about Margie herself, or the Lincoln Park Inn. It’s the tiny observations about domestic life:
*”My supper is ready, the kids are in bed…”*
Here’s a man with everything he’s supposed to want, and yet his soul paces at the door.
When I was younger, I tried to outrun my own restlessness. I thought the solution was to keep busy: rehearsing endless chord changes, tinkering with my truck, building elaborate wooden toys for the kids. But the longing stayed, like the faintest taste of whiskey hours after the glass was empty. It wasn’t about another woman, or even about escape. It was the ache for a whisper of freedom, the foolish belief that somewhere, life was lighter, easier, unburdened by routine or regret.
And yet, “Margie’s At The Lincoln Park Inn” never passes judgment. That’s what makes it so merciless: it invites empathy for the cheater, the bored, the lonely, the people stuck in lives they built themselves. The melody itself moves slow, like a heartbeat refusing to skip, as though urging us all to accept the human condition—with all its contradictions.
There’s a line, near the song’s end, when the narrator faces the quiet after the storm has passed:
*”But tomorrow she’ll be back at the Lincoln Park Inn,
And I’ll have to open that door.”*
I think about that door a lot. It’s easy to imagine it as the entrance to the hotel room, but for me, it’s the doorway between who we are and who we want to be. Most of us will never walk through it. We’ll stay home, eat our suppers, tuck our children in. But the longing remains. That’s what Tom T. Hall captures: the impossibility of being satisfied, and the small, sad victories in staying put, even when it hurts.
Whenever I play this song live—and I still do, when the club is dark and the mood hushed—I see the older couples squeeze each other’s hands a little tighter. They know. We all know.
Sometimes, late at night when I pass under the halo of a Helmond streetlamp, I find myself humming the refrain under my breath, tracing old regrets like tire tracks in a spring field. “Margie’s At The Lincoln Park Inn” is not a story of shattering or redemption, but of daily survival—of grappling with temptation, of refusing yourself, of letting love be enough, even if it isn’t everything. For those who’ve never heard it, I urge you: pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and let Tom T. Hall whisper into the places you keep secret.
We all have our Lincoln Park Inn—the place in the mind where longing lingers. I carry mine with me, just as surely as the melodies I strum each night.
—Kroes den Bock