Early last Friday morning, Lance Mills was awakened by his son telling him the Swannanoa River in their backyard was coming over its banks. In just a few hours, their home in the small community of Swannanoa, located between Asheville and Black Mountain, North Carolina, would be flooded.
“I didn’t realize they had issued an evacuation order for our area,” Mills tells Rolling Stone. “By 9 a.m. it was no longer safe for us to drive out. We had to shelter in place.”
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A longtime area musician and singer-songwriter, Mills and his family were one of the innumerable groups of folks in Western North Carolina and greater Southern Appalachian devastated by ravaging floodwaters from the record-setting rainfall of Hurricane Helene. The rushing water knocked Mills’ home off its foundation, forcing him to smash a hole through the ceiling with kitchen knives and a hammer to gain access to the roof. With he and his family precariously perched atop their home, they drifted downriver.
“The edge of the roof was crackling and buckling,” he says. “Luckily, the house got caught up on some pine trees and couldn’t go much further. We sat there and waited for the rescue boats.”
After being rescued, and retrieving their dogs and cats, the Mills family found refuge at a local emergency shelter. Mills made his way to Greenville, South Carolina, to regroup and gather supplies. While speaking to Rolling Stone, he was already heading back to Swannanoa to help out.
“We lost everything, but we didn’t lose each other,” Mills says. “There’s so many people who lost more than we did. They lost loved ones, their pets didn’t make, or they didn’t have insurance. But this community will persist through whatever happens.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll from Helene in Western North Carolina alone was approaching 60. With many more still unaccounted for in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the region’s residents are slowly beginning to not only absorb the severity of the situation, but also pick up the pieces of their lives, physically and emotionally.
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“We have lost everything,” says Danny McClinton, co-owner of the Salvage Station music venue in Asheville, which has a reputation for being one of the most vibrant live music cities in the country. Located along the French Broad River, the club, which was slated to host a two-night run with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead this coming weekend, was decimated by the flooding.
Upriver, the creative heartbeat of Asheville and the artistic epicenter of Southern Appalachia known as the River Arts District was wiped out. From artisan studios to breweries and other small businesses in the district, the waters erased a huge chunk of the city’s cultural identity. “The RAD is going to need a lot of love,” says Russ Keith, owner of the popular club the Grey Eagle. “Everybody’s impacted.”
Although the Eagle was safely uphill from the flood, Keith wasn’t as lucky with his other venue, the Outpost near Carrier Park on the French Broad. It was completely destroyed. “It’s devastating,” he says.
According to local officials, it could be days before power and cellular service are restored to the city, and perhaps weeks until water and sewage services return to normal. On Wednesday, 250,000 customers were still without power. To help meet residents’ needs, the Grey Eagle has been offering free water and meals to the community and also hosted an impromptu concert with local singer-songwriter Billy Jonas on the outdoor patio. (Here’s how to contribute to disaster relief from Hurricane Helene.)
“This is a place to get together, hug each other and share a story,” Keith says. “We support each other. That’s what music does.”
But at least for now, the music is falling silent. All officials shows scheduled for Asheville in the foreseeable future have been canceled. “It’s hard to put into words how bad it is,” says Brian Good, co-owner of the Asheville Music Hall downtown, and the French Broad River Brewery, also a music venue, in the heavily decimated Biltmore Village neighborhood. “To say this is a tragedy of epic scale is an understatement.”
Body recovery efforts throughout the region are ongoing, and nightly curfews remain in effect to prevent looting. For those left in Asheville, the word on the street is simple: If you can leave town safely, go now.
But conditions in surrounding communities are just as dire. The small towns of Canton, Cruso, and Bethel in Haywood County were torn apart, only three years after recovering from a 2021 flood from Tropical Storm Fred that left six dead. Riverside towns along the French Broad, like Marshall and Hot Springs, were severely affected, with thick mud and silt plastering the buildings. In Marshall, the river gauge attached to the Old Marshall Jail, a restaurant, music venue, and lodging spot right on the river, hit 27 feet at its peak.
“Every business in town washed away,” says Old Marshall Jail owner Josh Copus. “I’m a very optimistic person, but I don’t know if we can come back from this.”
A few doors from the OMJ sits Zuma Coffee, a decades-old haven for weekly bluegrass jams, with Mal’s, a lively Americana/country music joint, around the corner on Main Street. Like the OMJ, both businesses are gone, their futures unclear.
“We’ll be rebuilding for months, if not years. Only time will tell what this means for this region,” Copus says. “I love Marshall with all my heart, but I don’t know if it makes sense to have a town on the river [anymore].”
Amid the chaos in Western North Carolina, one silver lining emerged in the form of radio program The Eddie Foxx Show. Broadcast on 99.9 KISS Country FM, the longtime Asheville-based show offered up-to-date information on road closures and aid stations in the news desert caused by the lack of cell service and internet access. Listeners called in to give live reports of what they were experiencing and try to connect with family yet to be located.
“This community is what radio is all about, coming together,” Foxx says. “We’ve had people that hadn’t heard from loved ones call us and get the word out, then those loved ones call back and we’re able to connect them. It warms my soul.”
By Monday evening, singer-songwriter Caleb Caudle was stockpiling supplies to bring to musician friends and loved ones in Asheville. A North Carolina native, Caudle left his current nationwide tour in the Midwest and bolted for Southern Appalachia. Caudle’s Dobro player, Carter Giegerich, who lives in West Asheville, filled his truck bed with numerous gas cans to help friends and strangers alike.
“This flood is a wakeup call for the kind of communication infrastructure we’ve been lacking in the western counties [of North Carolina],” Giegerich says. “The music community here is always taking care of each other after things have gone sideways.”
For Lance Mills, he plans on returning to what’s left of his Swannanoa home this week. Not to survey the damage, but to retrieve his cherished 1974 Martin D-18 acoustic guitar. While fleeing the flood, Mills placed the guitar safely above the waterline.
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“The most important thing is the safety of my family,” Mills says.
But now that his wife, kids, and pets are accounted for, it’s time to track down his six-string. When asked what song he might play first, Mills paused for a moment and chuckled — his first laughter in days. “It’s this song I wrote about the [Western North Carolina] floods in 2004,” Mills says. “It’s called, ‘Man, It Rained.’”
