When Winter Storm Fern hit Nashville late last month, more than 230,000 Nashville Electric Service customers lost power. For some, the outages, caused by a heavy buildup of ice on power lines and soon-to-fall trees, lasted nearly two weeks, all while temperatures dropped into the single digits.
The weather had some obvious consequences throughout Nashville’s music community. Country Music Hall of Famer Marty Stuart canceled his tour after he slipped on the ice and fractured his wrist, leaving him unable to play guitar or mandolin. And many music venues, particularly those off Broadway (downtown Nashville has buried power lines and fewer trees, and, in general, experienced less damage than neighborhoods), lost power and had to close. But much of the anxiety and the lasting setbacks weren’t immediately obvious until the ice began to melt. Looking back now, many musicians say the effects from Fern will be felt for months, if not longer.
While many residents scrambled to find reasonably priced hotel rooms or generators, or bunked with friends who had electricity, the city’s professional musicians also had to contend with keeping their gear out of the cold. Many musical instruments, particularly hollow wooden ones like acoustic guitars and fiddles, as well as pianos, are susceptible to damage from temperature and humidity fluctuations. Wood cracks, finish peels, and the sounds of the instruments can change forever.
Manuel A. Delgado, one of the family owners of East Nashville’s Delgado Guitars, a nearly century-old guitar maker, knows exactly how hard freezing temperatures and humidity can be on instruments, given the thousands he has built and repaired.
“Think about it like when you wake up with a nosebleed in the winter,” Delgado says. “It dries out the wood, too.”
Joe Denim, a singer-songwriter and comedian who has toured with Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney, packed his family off to a hotel when their house lost power. But he stayed at home, bundled up for eight days, to keep the generators running and protect his recently tuned grand piano and other instruments. (Ironically, Denim had been scheduled to play a show in Illinois with Vanilla Ice.)
“Some of those instruments are old enough to qualify for AARP,” Denim says. When the power finally came back on, he gradually warmed the instruments to room temperature, slowly removing blankets and increasing the thermostat. So far, he hasn’t seen any damage.
Glen Pangle made a similar, chilly decision. He was relieved when the power stayed on at Sid Gold’s Request Room, the piano bar he owns in East Nashville with his wife Kira Small, in part because they could remain open and generate income during the often-slow month of January. But when the club’s heat gave out, Pangle worried that the subfreezing temperatures would damage their piano, without which, Pangle and Small don’t have a livelihood.
Small ran home to grab blankets and pillows, and Pangle slept in the cold club, running multiple space heaters — several for the grand piano, one for him — to keep the instrument from cracking.
Most professional musicians own many instruments, and some were forced to choose which ones to protect. In addition, many were worried about theft. Without electricity and Internet service, alarms and security systems were inoperable, and musicians like Russell DuFresne, who is also shop manager at Nashville Amplifier Service, had instruments stolen. DuFresne, who had just moved to Nashville the previous week, says he lost nine vintage guitars.
Other musicians were constantly on the go in search of warm rooms to store their instruments. When the temperature dipped below 15 degrees, singer-songwriter Alissa Griffith packed up five of her guitars and she and her husband took them on a couch-surfing adventure around Nashville. Merna Lewis made multiple trips back-and-forth from her home to the friend’s house where she waited out the cold, choosing which fiddles and mandolins to bring and detuning the instruments she left behind in the hope of reducing tension and the likelihood of breakage. Bass player Mandy Shucher and her family also bunked with friends, but the quarters were cramped and she could only take the bass she uses for gigs downtown. Like Lewis, she detuned her ukuleles and guitars, wrapped them in blankets, and bundled them up in her bed.
It was a hard decision for Shucher. “If we are traveling, I don’t put instruments under the plane. I don’t leave them in the van,” she says. “I am used to treating them as an extension of myself.”
Back at Delgado Guitars, which did not lose power, Delgado allowed friends and customers to store their instruments in his shop, with the handshake understanding that he could not control what would happen if the building lost power. That was good enough for most. And despite the concerns, Delgado believes many instruments damaged in the cold can be repaired. He’s already hearing from folks looking for help.
While some of the work needed may seem minor, “smaller repairs can really add up,” says Jules Belmont, a Nashville musician and bandleader. That’s in addition to the cost of trying to reschedule canceled gigs.
“The amount of work either totally lost or rescheduled for musicians and venues is so, so high because of this [storm] and we have no recourse for most of it,” Belmont says, noting that many musicians are freelancers who are not paid when they don’t work. While he was able to move many instruments out of his home during the power outages, it would have “taken a moving truck” to fit them all, he says, and the process of choosing what to leave, on top of the uncertainty about what was happening in the city, was exhausting.
Independent club owners across Nashville shared similar concerns. The leadership of DRKMTTR Collective, a non-profit music venue in East Nashville that lost power for days, posted on social media that canceling shows and being closed for a week was “absolutely detrimental” to its existence. They asked fans to make donations to support the venue and quickly raised more than $14,000, in part due to one $10,000 donation. Olive Scibelli, DRKMTTR’s co-executive director, had concerns about the fund-raising because the club had recently asked their community for financial support. But they had no other options.
Scibelli says independent venues will continue to suffer without systemic industry change, which the recent ice storm only compounded. At East Nashville’s the 5 Spot, the freeze prompted the club to create a “Support Pass,” a way for concertgoers to pay for tickets or cover charges today for future entry. In a social media post, the 5 Spot described its financial situation as “pretty dire.”
As unpredictable climate events like the recent ice storm become more frequent, this certainly won’t be the last time that venues and musicians will have to consider such issues. The only question is if they’ll survive. “The health of these arts spaces,” Scibelli says, “means they are one natural disaster away from closing.”
