Asheville songwriters converged to create The Flood: Music for MANNA. Among the songs are delta blues, folk, rock, roots, and some genre-defying tunes.

Here are the artists and, in their own words, what they saw during the Hurricane Helene disaster that drove them to write their song.

In order of appearance on the album

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We were all in shock in the aftermath of Helene.

I didn’t feel anything for weeks in my day to day, as many of us went into action mode. Yet to see my dear friends lose everything they owned, to hear about the little five-year-old girl, my own son’s age, whose mother placed her on the roof before being swept away by water, I knew on some level there was an unexplored sadness that was changing me irrevocably.

I wrote “What Remains” because in the stillness and  aloneness of creativity, I found that I was able to feel again. As I watched my community recover, I saw in the eyes of the passersby that many were beginning to feel again, and the emotion I witnessed  was deep love. Love for our home, the land, the lost, and for all whom and what remained.

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We could tell that this hurricane was unlike anything we’d ever seen in the mountains of North Carolina, by the way the little creek that runs by our house turned into a raging, threatening river, by the continuous sound of the multitude of helicopters overhead, and by the sudden loss of power, water, and cellphone signal.

But it wasn’t until I drove through Swannanoa that I realized how powerfully devastating this event was. Entire sections of human life just swept away, leaving only waste and wreckage. I was thinking about beautiful Swannanoa, where we used to live, when I wrote this blues. I know a lot of good people lost everything, and I was just trying to put myself in their shoes.

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Dismay.

After the winds stopped and the sun came out, there was silence. No electricity and no news. I started to drive out of my neighborhood to find water and canned goods but couldn’t leave because trees were down across all roads for as far as I could see, along with the powerlines. I heard chainsaws buzzing behind felled trees as people were cutting their way out.

The next day I did get out, and the floodwaters were still so high that the River Arts District was underwater. Asheville Guitar Bar… up to the roof. The Salvage Station music venue stages couldn’t be seen. The word “biblical” had been used on the radio, and I was dismayed at how large, destructive, and sorrowfully complete the flood was. It was this hourly escalation of discovering that it was much worse than I realized.

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The story of the Craig family who lost 11 of 13 family members was especially poignant to me and was the one story I couldn’t let go of emotionally or spiritually.

I felt like I wanted to write a song in southern Appalachian style and that also provided a history of the event the way old mountain music used to do.  Their story deserves to be preserved in song and passed down for other generations to understand the magnitude of loss brought by Helene.

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This song was inspired by my experience during Hurricane Helene. During the first few days, no one had a way of communicating. Cell phone towers were down, so you could not call out to family or communicate with friends in the Asheville area.

This song describes the experience of being on an island and having to really rely on friends and the community to get through each day.

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I knew instantly what my song would be: a thank you note to everyone who rushed to help our stricken area.

I didn’t want to focus on what we’ve lost, or how tough it’s been. I wanted to acknowledge that for quite some time, between our local volunteers and our churches and the big guys like FEMA, the National Guard, and the Red Cross, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting someone trying to help someone else. So really that’s all this song is: A thank-you note.

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A few days after Helene, I drove through Swannanoa. The funky barbeque cafe was destroyed. Mr. Redmon’s auto repair business, where my 92-year-old friend had taken his truck forever, was all but flattened.

I walked the River Arts District in Asheville. Two weeks earlier I’d sat with my musician son and had a beer in the sunny hubbub that been a lively, creative sprawl of studios, restaurants, bars, and riverside walkways. Riverbanks with birds singing and colorful kayaks everywhere. Now it was rubble. Paintings were found down in the mud. Twisted bicycles, cars halfway up trees.

There was a weight that settled over all of us. Even those of us who’d had only reparable damage felt smothered. The appeals on Facebook and on radio were all of heartbreak—a woman asking for news of her father; people looking for help finding cows, pigs, lost horses, dogs, cats, houses, cars… and families. We were tearing up all the time.

And yet, I kept hearing about neighbors helping neighbors and strangers helping strangers and people making do, starting with nothing. I took to the guitar and put the things I’d seen and heard in words because I needed to say something about these tough-as-nails survivors and how hard they’d been hit. I couldn’t fix a house or drive a mule train into a stranded town.  But I could write a song to tell their stories, though most of it hurt too bad to tell.

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A terrible realization.

I was in bed with a fever for two days, listening to the wind and rain outside. It felt like a bad dream. The electricity went out, then the cell service and water. I stepped outside to find people walking around in a daze, or standing in groups, assessing the damage. Massive trees were down everywhere, blocking roads, crushing cars and houses. I decided to try my luck getting over to East Tennessee to get gas, water, food, and information for family and friends. I headed up Interstate 26 and it seemed promising until I saw cars driving back towards Asheville. At the top of the mountain a man stood in the road turning traffic around. I heard him say to the car in front of me, in a strong, matter-of-fact voice, “No bridge. No town. Everything’s gone.” I didn’t ask questions. The man told me all I needed to know: everything’s gone.

I went back home and did what I could to help, like everyone in Western North Carolina did. I woke up in the middle of the night and started this song …  and finished it as I learned more about the extent of the suffering and damage. But it started with the man on the interstate a the top of the mountain, above the total destruction of his home, his town, his world, doing what he could, and simply telling it like it is.

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My wife and I relocated to the Asheville area a few weeks before Helene hit.

I had a chainsaw, and with a buddy, bought a second one and headed down to Swannanoa, one of the worst areas hit to see how we could help out. We cut trees off roads, peoples’ property. At times we couldn’t even access roads to reach people needing help.

Seeing all that devastation first hand made a huge impact on me. Just 15 minutes away to my home in Candler, and the lack of damage there, made it all so surreal. I spent many hours just thinking about everything that so many people lost.

Swannanoa… it was nothing less than a war zone.

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Songwriting  is therapeutic for me… and I needed it. So many emotions were flying around all at once during that time. Just navigating moment to moment was quite a ride. Human beings though, being  LOVING and KIND and GENEROUS to one another, was the thing that struck me the most. Actually experiencing that… “doing for others and others doing for you,” kind of helped me believe in people again. Whether it was water, food, supplies… it took a village.

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This song was written with the words of my family, who either lived through, returned to or came for support. From family to strangers, no one could talk about what they went through without getting tears in their eyes. We would go to work clearing trees, then just stop to cry. The “back” from the storm was just as devastating as the storm. You could hear the trees, see them and feel them as they hit the house and cars. But when it was over it was even worse than you imagined.

The water, who could have imagined the rise of the rivers! But everyone was there, literally overnight neighbors and strangers became family, it was how to survive. Helene took so much, but the city seemed to roar even louder than the storm did in the aftermath with the outpouring of help for all of those in need and the strong bond of the Asheville Area community.

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Woke up to the day after the Hurricane hit.  Me and my wife did okay but our kids a few blocks away had a car destroyed, and had a tree fall on their house right above where their baby was sleeping. Afterwards,  I did some volunteer work all around Asheville, and I was just blown out by how hard it was for my fellow citizens. It inspired  me to write this song.

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I’m moved from the coast to escape the nasty weather. Low and behold, I was wrong. I lived right off of Bent Creek and after the hurricane, I was marooned for five days and all I had was a few cans of soup and my guitar. I decided to make the best of what I had and try and write some music when I wasn’t listening to my emergency radio. I was finished writing around the time the water had receded.

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I watched and experienced the hurricane firsthand when it happened.

It was like nothing I had ever seen, trees and power lines down everywhere blocking the roads and paths.

One of the strangest parts for me was seeing places I had been many times and seeing them under over 15 feet of water. The lyrics of the song are focused on the general state of Asheville.