A lot of hyperbole about Billy Strings gets thrown around these days. The many young converts he’s brought to bluegrass tout him online as already one of the genre’s greats, while the 32-year-old guitarist and more seasoned fans will always defer to legends like Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton, and of course, Doc Watson. But one thing that could not be argued this weekend was that Billy Strings’ three-night run in Asheville, NC was the most financially significant event to happen to the city post-Hurricane Helene, indirectly making Billy one of the town’s greatest financial benefactors behind FEMA.
Whether at the ExploreAsheville.com Arena for sold-out shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the half-dozen venues staging after-parties late into the night, or local restaurants who made fans feel right at home, Billy Strings and his followers were an ever-present force throughout town. While local municipalities—particularly in the Bible Belt—have had tempestuous relationships with the hippie breed dating back decades, Strings’ fourth-annual trip to the arena saw Asheville establish an officially sanctioned Shakedown Street, allowing vendors and artisans to set up shop in a vacant lot across from the arena (for a modest fee to the city, naturally).
The result was one of the first “normal” weekends in Asheville since Helene devastated the region and claimed more than 100 lives in late September. In addition to its profound natural beauty, Asheville has become a jewel of the Southeast thanks to a thriving music scene far more robust than most cities of 100,000 residents. Following The Storm, however, national tours were canceled left and right and local favorite Salvage Station was destroyed entirely—though the hybrid outdoor amphitheater/indoor club was already due to shutter at the end of 2024 to make way for a highway expansion project. This, coupled with a steep decline in seasonal tourism, made Asheville into something of an island in recent months. Many people around the country sent money, supplies, and prayers, but kept their distance out of a justified fear of flooding the region and depriving resources from locals and disaster relief workers…