After Flooding, Nashville Musicians Assess Losses.nashville flooding pictures
The country music star Brad Paisley was one of hundreds of performers who feared for their instruments this week after the Cumberland River overflowed. The water covered large areas of Nashville, flooding the Grand Ole Opry stage with two feet of it, causing heavy damage to the symphony hall and forcing electricity to be cut in a tourist neighborhood of downtown.
Mr. Paisley found out on Friday that most of his touring guitars and equipment were destroyed when flood waters spilled into SoundCheck, a 160,000-square-foot storage and rehearsal site, where more than 600 artists — from A-list country music stars like Mr. Paisley, Vince Gill and Keith Urban, to studio artists and touring musicians — stored their instruments and gear.
To his relief, a 1968 Paisley Telecaster, the guitar Mr. Paisley has played since he first started performing, was not damaged. But many of his touring guitars were covered to their neck joints.
Most of the stuff that we really use every day was sitting on the floor because it had been wheeled back in while we were off the road, and we were about to start rehearsals,” Mr. Paisley said. So it’s pretty much toast.”
Joe Glaser, who for 30 years has operated Glaser Instruments, a well-known guitar repair shop here, said, All of our most prominent guitar-player artists have their collections down there and quite a number of guitars, and these are drowned.”
They are the instruments that Nashville history was made on,” he added. He said he planned to spend much of the next several days helping salvage them.
Steve Azar, a country music singer who estimates that he lost more than $100,000 in equipment that was at SoundCheck, was scheduled to make a music video next week for his song Sunshine (Everybody Needs a Little),” but canceled after Second Avenue, one of the downtown streets where he had planned to film, was flooded.
Lorrie Morgan, a second-generation Opry performer who sang at a benefit concert organized by Mr. Gill on Thursday night, lost her performance wardrobe at SoundCheck.
I know it’s material things, and compared to what a lot of other people have lost, it’s minute,” Ms. Morgan said. But to me it’s how I made my living, and it’s how I made my career.”
Of course, musicians were not the only members of the city’s country music establishment to face flood losses. Ed Smith, whose Trail West western wear and boot shop on Second Avenue flooded Sunday, swapped photos with his employees in one of his other downtown stores, Betty Boots, as the waters of the Cumberland started to recede, and the city’s recovery efforts began.
We waded in in our clothes, barefooted and everything else, and we went in there,” Mr. Smith said, describing his staff’s operation to salvage boots. He said the water there came up to his chest.
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