By Adam Lucas

 

CHARLOTTE—Nothing has been normal in North Carolina for over four weeks. So it makes sense that Saturday night’s Concert for Carolina was far, far from a normal show.

                  

It still had the core of an Eric Church show. The Church Choir still tailgated across the street from the venue. Fans still came from far beyond the borders of North Carolina. In the end, 82,193 people packed into Bank of America Stadium, the largest music crowd in the venue’s history. They saw a night stuffed with unforgettable moments. Even now, going back through a list of what just happened in Charlotte, it’s hard to believe all of this occurred in one night.

                  

But it’s also hard to believe that the last month has happened. Maybe you have to be a North Carolinian to fully understand it. Or maybe you just have to be a person. Maybe you have to drive around the twisty, tiny roads of the small mountain communities around the western part of the state and see the houses pushed off their foundations, or the heaps of personal belongings piled at the curb outside of homes that now sit empty. Because those aren’t just appliances and furniture that have been ruined by the water that went everywhere—those are pieces of lives. 

                  

Twenty-four hours before the concert began, Ashe County High played its first home football game since Hurricane Helene. This is not a section of the state you have seen on television. This is the northwest corner, near the Virginia border. High school football on Friday night matters. Normal things happened, like cheerleaders flying through the air and parents working the concession stand.

                  

But before they kicked off, local pastor Steve Ashley took the microphone. In the immediate aftermath of Helene, Ashley and a group of locals couldn’t communicate with hundreds of community members. So they pulled an old paper map out of the closet, and they proceeded to go road by road, Jeep by ATV by just plain on foot, through the county to try to make contact with as many fellow community members as they could. Each time they covered a street, they highlighted it on the map in green marker. Eventually, they had an entire map covered in green.

                  

That’s not a normal fall month. Ashley told the crowd at Friday’s football game, “We have cried together, we have worked together, we have all asked the questions of why. Over the last four weeks, we have seen neighbors helping neighbors. People from every walk of life have laid their differences aside and have rolled up their sleeves to help their fellow man.”

                  

So Church and Luke Combs and all Saturday’s performers knew they were playing to a crowd that needed more than just a normal show. They needed an evening of extraordinary performances, which is exactly what they received, starting with Church opening the night—after a nearly two-hour weather delay during which it appeared exactly no one left—with “Hallelujah.” 

                  

On any other night, it would have been a fantastic finale. Tonight, it was the opener. 

                  

What else would you expect on an evening that included, just as a sampler:

                  

North Carolina’s own Randy Travis making a surprise appearance. “You, sir, are a living legend and an icon,” one of the evening’s hosts, Marty Smith, appropriately told him from the stage.

                  

Dolly Parton relayed, via Smith, that she was directing $1 million charitable funds at her discretion to the people of the state of North Carolina.

                  

Keith Urban made an appearance. His set included, for one of the first times ever, singing “Raise Them Up” live with Church (bookended by, later in the show, Combs and Church singing “Does To Me” live together for the first time ever). It was Urban’s birthday, a fact that was announced by—who else?—his wife, Nicole Kidman. You can probably guess what happened next: Church led the crowd in singing Happy Birthday to Urban.

                  

There was just the simple existence of James Taylor. Everyone already knew that hearing “Carolina In My Mind” in this environment was going to be iconic, and it was. But you forget just how impressive it is to sit and listen to someone who can intro a song with, “I played this as an audition for Paul McCartney and George Harrison in 1968,” and then launch into “Something in the Way She Moves.” 

                  

Sheryl Crow made a three-song appearance. The first was “Picture.” When it was over, she stood, looking a little amazed, alone on the stage. “I just got to play Picture,” she said, “with Eric Church.” 

 

The setting, as you can hopefully tell, was enormous. And somehow Church met it. He turned in a 16-minute “Mistress Named Music” medley, featuring ten different songs that ranged from Pour Some Sugar On Me to the Dukes of Hazzard theme. He did it all in the hardest way possible—solo, as he captivated over 82,000 people with just himself and a guitar.

                  

“I’ve never played a show closer to my heart,” Church told the crowd. The $24,513,185 raised on Saturday night is just a start. His intent and deliberate forethought  was obvious in the way he outlined a specific plan to do much more once the concert was finished. His Blueprint for the Blue Ridge is designed to provide housing for one hundred Avery County families devastated by the storm. 

                  

“In western North Carolina, it’s the community next door that comes to help,” he said. “And many of those communities are gone. So we’re going to be the community next door.”

 

And the community needed it. Streaming numbers were huge. Over 3,000 people crammed into the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville to watch the broadcast. The stadium completely sold out of merchandise, from hats to hoodies to posters. 

 

Everyone on stage Saturday was working for free. Panthers owner David Tepper donated the stadium and the artists donated their time, even if that meant—as was the case—they had to rehearse at midnight on Friday night to pull off some of the moments that made the evening unforgettable. Putting on an event like Saturday is a lot of fun. It is also an incredible amount of nonstop work for everyone involved, from emails in the wee hours of the morning to phone calls late at night. There’s a very good reason that one of a kind events don’t happen more often: they are exhausting.

 

Church and Combs closed the evening with an encore duet of “Carolina.” In one more signature moment, they took well-deserved understandable liberty with the lyrics, “Thank you for calling us home.”

 

Church had already summarized the entire reason for why the night happened, for why over 82,000 people had gathered with less than a month’s notice.

 

“I wouldn’t be here,” he told the crowd, “if not for how I was raised and where I was raised and who raised me.”