Seven weeks after Hurricane Helene blasted western North Carolina with unprecedented winds and floods, a visitor could browse around the mountain city of Asheville and feel like things have superficially returned to normal. At a garage taproom on Haywood Rd, folks sipped beer at sunset with dogs at their feet. Most restaurants were open, and downtown was functioning. But it’s a bit of a game face.
Not a half mile away, the city’s once vibrant River Arts District lies in mud-caked ruins. Upriver, the communities of Swannanoa and Black Mountain are half wrecked and deeply shaken by all that’s followed from a few terrible days in late September. Helene cut a path across the Gulf Coast and South, delivering up to three feet of rain across a wide region of mountain watersheds, focusing obscene amounts of runoff into river valleys that will never be the same. Some small towns were nearly obliterated. Interstate 40 collapsed into the Pigeon River in places and will be closed for up to a year. They’ll have to redraw maps after nearly 2,000 landslides, newly widened canyons, and the violent rerouting of rivers.
We rightly focus in such times on the lives lost - more than 100 in North Carolina alone - as well as widespread homelessness and hundreds of wrecked commercial properties and neighborhoods. My concern, over a three day visit in mid November, was the storm’s impact on western North Carolina’s world famous culture, on its ways of picking, singing, storytelling, and place making. Nashville and Asheville are sibling cities in many ways, major music markets that bookend the Appalachian region where much of country music was born. Our musical stories are intertwined, and it felt important to bear witness to this community in recovery.
While the storied resilience of the region’s people was being tested, their community spirit remained activated weeks after the storm. Most areas are stabilized, while others are still in acute need. It didn’t look like any one thing or feel any one way. I saw tragedy and I saw reassuring cultural adaptability, including a vital music venue back on line when I arrived on Thursday evening in hard-hit Black Mountain.
Black Mountain
White Horse Black Mountain, on higher ground at the center of its namesake town of 8,400 people, survived the storm and, and on this night it was full of people and music. Bluegrass band Unspoken Tradition played a show under temporary terms designed to welcome a public with stretched resources. Entry and drinks were all on a pay-what-you-can basis. In this cozy space, a couple hundred people took their minds off the destruction just a short walk away. Here as everywhere in the region, people’s situations had a lot to do with the elevation of their property, said White Horse co-owner Zach Hinkle.
“My house is a quarter mile down the road. We were under four feet. And there's a restaurant called the Bush Farmhouse, which is down some elevation. They had ten feet of water and got completely washed away,” Hinkle told me. As for his non-profit venue, he says “we got super lucky. Then we just opened the doors and we never closed them. We were here 12 hours a day from the time that we could get here in the morning until the (7 pm) curfew.” They took in donations of supplies and food and became a popup distribution center for people in need.
Hinkle’s father, a musician and music executive who returned to his home ground near Asheville after decades in New York, opened White Horse in a former Chevrolet dealership in 2008. It’s a spacious room with a truss and wood arched ceiling, art on the walls, a bar along the back, and seating on both chairs and couches. “We've got people in town who really believe in this place,” says Zach. “My Dad founded it as a listening room, but really, almost more than that, a community center. He never called it that, but he called it the living room, like the living room of the town.”
Sitting outside of White Horse, feeling the temperature dropping on the doorstep of winter, Zach Hinkle says most of the artists in the Asheville region, musical, visual or otherwise, have already been grinding it out with second jobs, living on the edge. So seeing every routine upended, from local trauma to the dearth of tourists, feels precarious. “It’s a scary time for art right now in general in this neck of the woods,”he says.
I heard about another music venue a few miles down the valley that had become a more established and long term aid distribution center, so I went there the next morning hoping to be of use. Not long ago, Silverado’s in Swannanoa was hosting large outdoor shows by Blackberry Smoke and The Steel Woods. Immediately after the flood, with the town cut off from the outside world because of washed out roads and bridges, the venue’s owners turned their building and stage area over to relief, from hot meals to diapers. By the time I arrived, it was a smoothly running machine in an improvised compound. Volunteers checked in and donned fluorescent work vests. Vehicles with supplies to donate made one loop of the grounds. Vehicles with people in need took the inside loop. From 10 am until 4 pm they came. Volunteers told me it was a relatively light day. I worked a truck receiving and distributing pet food, and I even got to see a few of the grateful dogs.
Many of the folks in line seemed shaken, and some were unguarded, talking about their needs and their anxieties without prompting. A guy with a paint business was desperately trying to find a heating unit that could keep his storage shed from freezing and ruining what’s left of his materials. I heard from a young woman worried about the December deadline when she and her children would be evicted from their FEMA-funded hotel. The beneficiaries were as diverse as Appalachia itself, White, Black, Native and Hispanic. Some were picking up lists of items for neighbors who couldn’t get off their property. A common sense looking woman had “Thanks National Guard!” and “Trump’s not my president!” written on her Honda in washable white marker. Later, a wide-eyed mountain hippie feller rolled through with a Trump window sticker on his pickup truck. The very recent election seemed remote in any event.
Asheville
Whatever these people are going through, the same goes for the region’s many musicians. One that we know of lost her home to a mudslide. Others struggled for weeks without power or water (which was finally restored to Asheville area customers last week). Jessica Tomasin, manager of Asheville’s renowned (and safe) Echo Mountain Recording studio and a prominent music scene activist, wrote this for her new Substack journal in mid October: “We were all in crisis mode for the first three weeks, but now we’re beginning to realize how long this recovery will take. We went from tunnel vision—only seeing what’s directly in front of us—to now looking around and grasping the full gravity of the situation we’re in.”
I spoke with Tomasin on Nov. 19, and she described a situation that, while more stabilized, was still ominous for creatives. “All of our industries - our hospitality, our food and beverage, our entertainment industry, our music industry - we're all related. And there's a lot of crossover. There's a lot of (musicians) who have supplemental income from bartending or waiting tables. For a small town, we're in this really unique position for musicians because of (tourism). You can eke out a pretty good living here by playing in a wedding band, playing in what I call menu venues - restaurants, hotel lobbies, breweries. Well, that's wiped out.”
Gar Ragland said something similar as he guided me on a driving tour of the River Arts District. He’s the founder and CEO of Citizen Vinyl, a record press, cafe, vinyl store and recording studio that I profiled here in 2022. The heavyweight 1930s building never lost power or internet and became a hub for downtowners in need of wi-fi, calls to loved ones, and device charging after the storm. But it’s also home to a business that’s taken a hit.
“We've lost the fourth quarter of visitation, which is what many businesses, ourselves included, look forward to each year and depend on to cash flow their businesses through slower times of the year,” Ragland said. “Even if (famed music venues) the Orange Peel or the Grey Eagle are open, we don't have people coming up from Atlanta to come catch a great show and spend some money in our restaurants and buy merch. So there's a big trickle down effect.”
While those marquee Asheville music halls avoided the worst, others in the River Arts District were inundated. The cozy Asheville Guitar Bar, established in 2016, was utterly trashed by many feet of water, though their old brick cotton mill building is standing and its owners hope to reopen. Very nearby, an indoor/outdoor venue called the Salvage Station was destroyed, though that business was scheduled to close at year’s end anyway. Also along the river, The Outpost, an outdoor music and recreation center, was flooded; the owners say they hope to reopen.
Reopening won't be in the cards for most of the studios and galleries along the French Broad in Asheville. Cinder block buildings had collapsed. Semi-trailers lay overturned in massive piles of building debris. A motorboat rested upside down 50 yards inland, and the quonset hut that held a White Duck Taco was left a hollowed out metal tube, its charming landscaping gone. Ragland pointed out stretches of barren land that had recently been parks with a dense tree canopy.
“People are struggling and trying to figure out what their next move is going to be,” Ragland said. “And many of us in Asheville are quite concerned about the long term economic impact here.”
Marshall
The French Broad flows north through Asheville, and for another 20 miles it collected even more water from scores of creeks and tributaries as it moved downriver toward what was my last and possibly most heartbreaking stop. Marshall, the seat of Madison County, is a historic, picturesque and famously narrow town of about 800 people that hugs a mile of county road and railroad track just a few feet above river level. With a bridge, a county courthouse, and many period buildings, it was a postcard burg with a vibrant culture.
On the first clear morning after the hurricane swept past, the river, mud-filled and polluted, crested so high that every first floor in town and some second floors were underwater. Joel Friedman, founder and owner of Zuma Coffee, watched from his third floor apartment (itself surrounded by the flood and very much at risk) as the town’s main music space, a converted train station from a bygone era, was destroyed.
“There was about 18 of us on top of the building,” Friedman said. “We all just watched as The Marshall Depot went down the river.” In a video, the building’s low profile green roof (its building attached below the surface) floats down Main St. and begins breaking up as it hits other structures. A caboose that had been part of the Depot’s public space was rolled to the other side of the road. And though he couldn’t see it directly from his home, Friedman knew that Zuma, the business and town hub he’d opened 20 years ago, was under about 10 feet of surging water. The coffee shop had for years hosted a regular, multi-generational bluegrass jam featuring the late bluegrass Hall of Fame fiddler Bobby Hicks.
Here seven weeks later, his building now mucked out and emptied, Friedman seemed at ease and motivated to rebuild. “Witnessing it live, I could live it and grieve it and kind of let it go, all in the same motion, knowing that everything had changed,” he said. “It would have been really hard to come back two or three days later. Somehow that was actually a blessing - witnessing it and knowing I had no power over it. It was going to do what it was going to do.”
The Depot, once a stop on the Norfolk & Southern rail line, wasn’t a professional music venue like the Grey Eagle in Asheville with a ticketing partner and a talent buyer. It was a grassroots community center that hosted local bands and bluegrass and acoustic music jams several times a week. “The music’s been going on there for about 30 years,” said Marshall native, arts promoter, and community elder Pat Franklin. “Those jams brought in musicians like you wouldn’t believe. I mean we had some boys that live out in the country who’d come down and they could just beat the front off a guitar or a mandolin.”
Rounding out a tragic triumvirate of Marshall music culture is the half inundated Old Marshall Jail, an extraordinary rehab project spearheaded by “artist and creative entrepreneur” Josh Copus. He and some friends bought the town’s decommissioned jail (1905-2012) at an auction and overhauled it like an art project into a boutique hotel, bar, and restaurant (called Zadie’s). Copus, a sculptor by trade, repurposed metal doors as patio tables, old prison bars as deck railings, and plate steel into walls. (The upper floor rooms survived, so I got to see their unique ochre and metal esthetic, while the downstairs had been stripped to the studs.) “I was trying to create a space that honored the past but wasn’t defined or stuck in it,” Copus said.
While the Jail hosted bands from time to time, it found a “highest and best use” (a phrase favored by Copus) playing host to a monthly “ballad swap” that was serving to revive a venerable and endangered Appalchian a cappella singing tradition. I’d heard a haunting sampler on my first night in Black Mountain when Donna Ray Norton, organizer of the Marshall swap, was invited to the stage to sing the 19th century song “Fine Sally.” Norton, an eighth generation North Carolina ballad singer, is part of a cadre of younger artists championing the old “hollerin’” style. The ballad swaps on the Old Jail patio overlooking the river grew over a year or so, and after they were displaced, a concert by about a dozen leading ballad singers sold out the Grey Eagle the night before I arrived in Asheville. They’re planning to take this unique show on the road in the new year.
“It’s really been amazing to see how quick it’s grown and how popular it is,” Norton told me. “I definitely thought it was going to die out a long time ago, and that was scary for me because I’m very proud of where I’m from and my family and our history. But now I’m not so scared anymore.”
Renewal
There exists a vast network of musicians, promoters, fans, and arts activists who do not take threats to Appalachian music and culture lightly. They sprang into action immediately, organizing benefit shows, such as the Appalachian Aid Bluegrass Concert, which was held Oct. 28 in Nashville with Jim Lauderdale, the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys and others. They raised $43,000 for Samaritan’s Purse, a disaster relief charity based in Boone, NC, and the IBMA Trust Fund. About the same time, Knoxville’s WDVX hosted an Appalachian Allies Benefit Concert with a focus on communities that were hard hit in east Tennessee. And a massive hurricane relief concert just wrapped a four-hour livestream from Madison Square Garden with Asheville star Warren Haynes, Dave Matthews, and a stacked jam band lineup.
“In the midst of all of this hardship and pain and suffering, there's been an incredible amount of grace and resilience that the community has demonstrated by showing up for each other,” said Gar Ragland. “The million dollar question is how long will people dependent on a typically vibrant entertainment economy here be able to hold out before they have to relocate to Nashville or Charlotte or somewhere where life has not been interrupted and impacted as significantly as it has been here?”
Zach Hinkle of Black Mountain put it this way: “These mountains have gone through a lot. And there's been a lot of perseverance. Mountain folks are tough. And so I have to believe that the culture of music and creation and creativity will persevere here. What form it takes is going to really depend on the kind of support that's given.”
Other Relief Resources
Radio station WNCW spotlights and updates relief efforts and updates here.
The White Horse Musicians Fund pays aid directly to regional artists in need.
ReString Appalachia collects and donates instruments to musicians who lost theirs due to the storm.
ArtsAVL, which has supported artists of all kinds since the 1950s, has launched a new aid program in the wake of Helene.
Blue Ridge Public Radio maintains a list of places to donate aid, focused now on cold weather relief for those who lack reliable shelter.
Thanks to Molly Nagel-Driessen for invaluable advance work on the report from Marshall, NC.
