Western North Carolina Music Community Still Coming Together to Recover from Hurricane Helene

It’s been nearly three months since Tropical Storm Helene marched through Western North Carolina, leaving an historical amount of wreckage in its path. When ND last checked in with the area’s roots music scene, folks were still in survival mode, focused more on navigating each 24-hour period than on writing new material and setting up tours.

This made sense. Most residents went many weeks without power or potable water. Mudslides in the mountains shut down the Blue Ridge Parkway and parts of I-40 between Asheville and Knoxville, Tenn. Chef Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen descended to feed folks who’d run out of supplies. And music stars like James Taylor were swooping in for benefit concerts to raise large funds to help with the devastation.

It took ten weeks to restore potable drinking water, though power came back a little sooner in Asheville and its environs. Now, as the year draws to an end, the WNC roots music scene is rolling back into gear.

“The neighborhood hubs where folks gathered under pop-up tents for Starlink internet and generator-powered electricity, maybe a spontaneous music jam, massage, or conversation with a stranger that instantly becomes a friend—all that has disappeared,” says singer-songwriter Anya Hinkle, whose own tour schedule took her out of town shortly after the storm for a few weeks. “We’ve all retreated inside our own houses, trying to get on with it.”

Indeed, “getting on with it” is part of the tradition of Southern Appalachia, and the spirit of perseverance has swept the city in the wake of the storm—particularly in the River Arts District (RAD). Artists whose galleries were destroyed came together to clean the mud that had become toxic from sewage and chemical runoff after the flood. Wearing masks and gloves, they cleaned up their work and offered it for sale online, to raise recovery funds.

Visual artists dominate the RAD’s mile-or-so of riverfront neighborhood between West Asheville and downtown. Studios are nestled in converted warehouses and historical brick buildings. Here and there an award-winning brewery, a Black-owned coffee shop, an irreverent theater producing only locally written plays. Taken together, the strip has long served as a center of Asheville’s magnetic arts world. The French Broad River, which runs through town, crested to its highest point since 1917, destroying much of the neighborhood—including long-time Ashville staple music venues Salvage Station and The Outpost.

The day after the flood, Outpost owner Russell Keith stood on the Clingman Avenue bridge and watched pieces of his neighbors’ studios float by. As he recalled over the phone recently, he was grateful his primary venue, The Grey Eagle, was spared.

Situated ever so slightly uphill from the bulk of the RAD, the beloved 25-year-old blue brick building emblazoned with a trippy mural of birds and guitars, has welcomed artists as varied as Ralph Stanley and Sharon Jones to its stage.

“We just lost our power for like sixteen hours,” says Keith, who still sounds shocked more than two months later, recalling the day after the storm: “I came down and I saw some of the apartment lights while I was driving down Clingman Ave. I [was] like, Uh, wait a minute. I pulled down the bottom of the hill and our marquee lights were on, and it just made my heart feel so good.”

As Keith looked around the neighborhood surrounding the venue, it seemed obvious to use his resources to pitch in. “We had a little bit of water,” he says, “so we opened up immediately and started giving away our inventory. Free food. … [We became] sort of a base for distributions of supplies. I went down to Atlanta a couple times and came back with stuff. We did that until we ran out of inventory.”

Keith also figured out how to get live music going again in Asheville. “We start[ed] filling in the holes for a lot of the bands [who] were either afraid to come or … [had] that perception of, like ‘Asheville is closed, you can’t get there,’” he says. “We pivoted and started doing a lot of local stuff on the patio. [We had] locals supporting us and we were supporting the musicians, and that was kind of keeping that community tight.”

Asheville’s music community is close-knit and dedicated to supporting their own. Unlike higher-profile, competitive music towns like New York, Nashville, or Los Angeles, Asheville’s scene contains its own microcosm of Southern Appalachian traditions. Community is implicit. The sheer number of artists is small enough that everyone knows each other and band members often cross-pollinate.

The Grey Eagle has been a center for that community since the late 1990s. Playing its stage—where bands like the Avett Brothers cut their teeth—has become a right of passage for local roots artists, who knew they could count on Keith for support after the storm.

“I played there the day after Thanksgiving,” says Asheville singer-songwriter David Wilcox. “I love how music brings us together, to remember what we love about our town.”

Meanwhile, twenty miles up I-40 in the center of Black Mountain, The White Horse—a sprawling music venue housed in the former McMurry Chevrolet building—was serving a similar role to The Grey Eagle: “We’ve become a community center as much as we’re a music venue,” says White Horse founder and owner Bob Hinkle.

“Right after the storm, we looked around and said, ‘We can crumple up into a ball and die or we can move on.’  [We figured the] way to move on was to (A) not close and (B) start to collect money and everything else we could for people who were truly in need of it. Our place looked like a military storage kitchen there for a while, with every possible thing you could want and some that you wouldn’t want.”

Hinkle’s own house was condemned after the storm (as were those of roughly 100 of his neighbors) and he’s still waiting for clearance to return to it. But his venue naturally became a lifeline for the community he’s served for so long.

That community started gathering on the White Horse patio the day after the storm, so people could find each other and connect about what they’d all just experienced. It became such a gathering spot that it wasn’t long before musicians decided to set up in the corner and play without amplification—power was out for a couple weeks—and hand out free warm beer.

The spirit of service and generosity has continued, now that the amps are working, the water is flowing, and the local beer is cold again. The White Horse, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, turned the door into a “pay what you can” venture that would benefit local nonprofits.

“What emerged for us, and it’s one of the most important things we’ve done in our history,” says the White Horse’s Hinkle, “was pay what you want for the music and the bar. You could pay one dollar or one thousand dollars, depending on what you wanted to put in the jar.”

The community support has been remarkable. “To my surprise, the number of funds we’ve been taking in with that model is almost the same as if the tickets that were being sold at the usual price. It’s been a real eye-opener in terms of finding out what people are made of,” Hinkle says.

Amanda Ann Platt, singer-songwriter and frontwoman for The Honeycutters, has been is among those on stage at the White Horse in recent weeks. She appreciates the pay-what-you-can approach. “They’re … splitting the profits 50/50, with half going to the artist and half going to hurricane relief. This might be a naive view, but it seems to me that events such as this tend to fuel the arts.”

Indeed, this community spirit of shared responsibility and loving support is what has long sustained the cultural landscape of Southern Appalachia. From family jams in mountain hollers to the sustenance of venues like The White Horse and The Grey Eagle, no flood can wash the music away.