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Kerrville has been reeling for most of the last two weeks from record flooding and from the loss of life that accompanied it. People from across the state and the nation poured their support into the region's communities.
Kerrville musician Robert Earl Keen plans to offer his own contribution to the healing process.
He was slated for a concert in the city’s Louise Hays Park on July 4, but the torrential rains and record flooding made that impossible.
Now he’s decided to put on that concert, but only bigger. It will benefit the Community Foundation of the Hill Country.
“We started on the fifth of July and have been working tirelessly ever since. We donated 100% of our merch sales on this tour to that Community Foundation, which is now pushing up to about $100,000 that we’re giving to them,” he said.
Keen has a deep connection to Kerrville.
“We became very good friends with the Eastlands. They were the owner-operators of [Camp] Mystic. And both my girls went to Mystic,” he said. “The older one went there for eight years. The younger one was part of the little cabin that got washed away—Bubble Inn—when the dam broke there above Ingram.”
His "younger one" is now 25 and wasn’t at Camp Mystic on July 4. She attended summers in years past.
“They went there for several years. They've got just incredible childhood memories of a great place,” Keen said.
Keen said he was especially shocked when he saw the footage of the floods because he was so familiar with the area.
“The first thing that really came out was the tragedy at Mystic. And then as time went by, if you go up and down that road, [Highway] 39 that goes to Hunt and beyond, all those cabins there that people had built over the years, they got washed away. And as time went by, that's when we started learning that entire families were washed away, right?” Keen said.
Keen selected the Whitewater Amphitheater between Canyon Lake and New Braunfels for the benefit concert. And he won't be the only star on the stage: “Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall, Jack Ingram, Tyler Childers, Cross-Canadian Ragweed, Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen, Terry Allen, Ray Wiley Hubbard, Hayes Carl, and on and on,” he said.
It all starts at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 28. Find more information on his website.
