(L-R) Chris Jaconson, Roberta Lea, Kelly Murphy, Bobby Black Hat Walters, Karen Benson, and Karl Werne raised $7,700 to benefit musicians in need recovering from Hurricane Helene.
By Jim Morrison
Bobby Jaramillo arose early, as usual, on a September morning in the building that was home, studio, and storage building for an extensive collection of guitars and other instruments, amps, speakers, and a recording studio. Rain poured down at his place in Swannanoa in the Blue Ridge Mountains east of Asheville.
He didn’t think much about it. He’d been through five floods and escaped unscarred even though the river is only a football field away. There was no reason to think this would be different. He put on coffee, took a shower, and when he returned, he noticed the water coming around the building. “I’d never seen that before,” he recalled, “I was like, Ok, this is kind of weird.”
Still, the past reassured him. Until the water started seeping through the walls. In the storage room, he began stacking the three dozen or so guitars he owns with his brother higher, on top of benches, shelves, anything he could find. Then it was the banjos, mandolins, amps, microphones, and computers.
These were treasures collected over decades playing around the area with friends and in a bluegrassy band named Grassfed FRED — an acronym for Free Range Earth Dwellers. They played their own songs and what they called backyard tomatoes — tunes written by local songwriters including Malcolm Holcombe.
Inside the building the water crept higher, covering his Crocs up to his ankles and then his knees. An hour or so passed. Higher ground called. He waded into a bathroom and climbed into the space above, not easy for a 71-year-old. His phone was dying, waking only for emergency calls. His vision was limited, but he could see water four feet high or so. He pulled a tarp up there around him to stay warm. A tree crashed into a window. Water, inevitable, unforgiving water, rose higher. He stayed here, unable to stand, while the storm raged, the building crackling and popping.
When the water finally began receding, Jaramillo descended from his perch into the hell that was Helene. Walls had disappeared or had caved in. “Everything was gone,” he said. “It’s hard for me to explain what my eyes and my brain saw when I crawled down there. I’m not blaming God or Jesus or the devil, or anybody. It was kind of like, I’ve done something wrong, and somebody was making me pay for it, and I haven’t. I’ve been a nice person. It was just, that’s the way it felt. It was like, Why me? And why everything?”
Gone were his three amigos, the mandolins he played during performances, including one made by his brother, Jimmy, a luthier. Gone were the dozens of guitars, other instruments, and studio equipment. A lifetime of music carried away in an unyielding current. “I’m heartbroken,” he said.
Soon, word got around. Locals brought him instruments they found in the apocalyptic landscape carved by the water. None were his.
But today Bobby Jaramillo is playing music again, strumming a $1,500 Taylor guitar, sending out those backyard tomatoes. Up first was “Just in Time,” by North Carolina songwriters Joe Freeman and Dan Lewis.
Along with others in western Carolina, he’s the beneficiary of outsiders they didn’t know before the hurricane scarred their community, outsiders who reached out to locals they also didn’t know, forging links of a chain sparkling in the dark aftermath of an unimaginable tragedy.
Jaramillo’s guitar was donated thanks to an Asheville benefit played by nearly a dozen local artists with Big Pink Music at Victorian Station in Hampton. Their October event raised $7,700 plus the guitar.
The cold-hard cash raised that day at Big Pink is warming the mountain communities served by LEAF Global Arts, an Asheville-based nonprofit that has created a local artists’ relief fund. Stipends support local musicians playing benefits. It’s a virtuous circle, donations giving birth to more donations, an investment compounding empathy, and helping to rebuild the broken spirit of a community.
(Jennifer Pickering, Bobby Jaramillo, and Jimmy Jaramillo of Jaramillo’s Pickin Parlor in Swannanoa, North Carolina)
How that guitar and how that donation landed in Asheville is a story of coincidences and connections that begins in Hampton with a canceled concert. Kelly Murphy, a founder of Big Pink, which supports local music through open mics and concerts at Victorian Station, had scheduled a show with folksinger Johnsmith. A death in his family caused him to cancel just two weeks out. Murphy had the room reserved and an ABC license.
She realized about 10 local musicians had signed up to attend so they had the evening free. “I’d been watching the news. It’s heartbreaking. It’s horrible, right? Like, God, we should do something,” she said. “So I put feelers out on Facebook.”
Cathy Sprague of The Storyweavers had seen a post with photos from former local musician Dustin Furlow about Asheville, where he’d moved. Murphy happened to see her post and messaged her, “Let’s do something.”
One after the other, Murphy started asking musicians if they’d play a benefit. She heard yes after yes. Eventually, the lineup included Bobby Blackhat, Carol & Dale, Dry Land, The Harris Creekers, Jacob Vanko, Karl Werne, Kim & Lana, Roberta Lea, Ron Fetner, and Tret Fure.
But Kelly realized that a capacity of 60 people at $25 or so each would only yield so much. She asked the performers to get pledges, posted online for donations, and Sprague organized an auction and bake sale that netted a nice pot of green. On top of the $7,700 windfall, one of the musicians had a relative who donated the guitar.
Murphy had the money and eventually the guitar in hand, but no idea where they should go. She and Tret Fure, another performer, mined contacts in Asheville and came across Annie Wenz, a songwriter who suggested LEAF.
LEAF does arts education celebrating not only the roots of American music but culture from across the globe. It has more than two dozen artists who teach and run summer camps for young students. It supports culture keepers in 10 countries, including places like Haiti and Rwanda that have endured disasters. When Katrina hit New Orleans, LEAF held a fundraiser. When Helene hit Asheville, Greg Lucas of the Preservation Jazz Hall Foundation offered a $50,000 matching artist relief fund and Tipitina’s, the legendary New Orleans venue, held a fundraiser.
The money had a home. But not the guitar.
Jennifer Pickering, the co-executive director of LEAF, asked their teachers if any had lost their instruments. None had. But Melissa McKinney, one of LEAF’s teachers, had a friend, Kyley Byrd, a songwriter who played with the Jaramillo brothers. After the flood, they had been working to get buckets of toys and books to children out of school. Eventually, Byrd told her about Bobby and Jimmy’s loss. “We really connected about that, and I just put them in the front of my mind,” McKinney said.
When Pickering called her to ask if she knew anyone who had lost an instrument, McKinney had the answer. “I was like, oh, yeah, Kyley’s band,” she added. “I didn’t really know the guys. I knew Kyley dearly and she spoke so highly of them.”
“Everybody’s just looking for ways they can help because we’ve all been affected on different levels,” McKinney said. “Being able to help the people that are in our circles, and not just in our circles, but in our expanded circles, has, for me, been a way to work through all the trauma we’ve been going through.”
Pickering has spent time in a trailer park just down the road that she passed by for years. “It’s an extraordinary community,” she said. “The artists’ relief fund allowed us to bring artists into that community and spaces and places that we weren’t before.”
Bobby Jaramillo is giving back by turning over his studio and home to a Christian group that’s building mini homes over the next months. They agreed to redo his destroyed siding for a place to stay, then came out to the house where he’s staying to jack up his floors and install a water heater. “There’s a lot of kindness in the world, even though there’s politics the way it is,” he said. “Here in Swannanoa, I didn’t see people asking each other if they were Democrats or Republicans, Christians or Muslims. They were all out there helping one another. It didn’t matter, and that meant a lot to me. ”
For Pickering, the Jaramillo connection was new — and old. She had her first drink in town when Bobby’s parents ran a bar in front and a store in the back of the flooded building. It’s not far down the road from her. But she’d never met the brothers.
“It’s just a great reminder to stay curious and keep on exploring what’s in your own backyard as well as the world,” she said, “because it has been an extraordinary delight meeting both of these brothers and then finding out our stories have paralleled over the past 30 to 50 years.”
To donate, go to https://theleaf.org/
