Not a Drop of Rain

Robert Earl Keen on the flood, his friends in the business, dark novels, hiding the guns, “portraying” optimism and telling a good story.

Photographs by Erika Goldring & Emma Delevante

The river barely made a sound that day, its surface glinting as it slowly slipped downstream. The late-August sun filtered through the wispy canopy of ancient cypress and sycamore leaves, stirring in sparse breezes. Their twisted roots gripped the limestone banks of the Guadalupe, where we gathered beneath the bright Texas sky. Artists and fans brought together by that river — and the tragedy it unleashed this summer. Yet there we were — forgiving it, leaning on it, bound to it.

That lyric from Robert Earl Keen’s song — “It’s been a long, hot summer, not a drop of rain” — has always haunted me. This year, it felt eerily fitting. The floods came in the middle of one of the worst droughts in recent memory. There’s a catchy name for it now: weather whiplash. We’ve lived it long enough to simply call it what it is — pray for rain, then plead for it to stop when it comes all at once. The paradox was inescapable — a flash flood born from drought, grief tinged with gratitude, beauty wrung from sorrow. Would such a gathering of music have even happened if not for this terrible event? Probably not. But we weren’t just there for a concert. We were there to heal and to help others heal.

The Hill Country is still drying out — physically, emotionally, spiritually. Vast swaths of land were razed, bare foundations stand like haunting headstones, lives lost and forever changed. Preliminary estimates place the damage from the July 2025 floods between $18 billion and $22 billion. Crews have already hauled away more than 140,000 cubic yards of debris — enough to fill 45 Olympic-sized swimming pools — with more still to go.

More than 135 lives were lost, 117 in Kerr County. Two are still missing. Twenty-seven of those were young girls spending their summer at camp.

Parents later stood before the Texas Legislature in support of camp safety reforms. They described their children’s absence in words that shake the soul.

“We are suspended in endless anguish, unable to move forward, unable to find peace,” said Cici Williams Steward, mother of Cile, one of the two still missing.
“I am in the never-ending nightmare that is my life now,” said Virginia Wallace’s mother. “I fight not to drown in it every second of every day. My anguish is as infinite as the stars in the sky — searing, blazing, exploding, a black hole of pain.”

There are no words to answer that kind of grief. It swallows you whole.

While families bore the weight of unimaginable loss, Keen was at his home preparing for his Fourth on the River event at Louise Hays Park in Kerrville that day. The stage washed away, and the entire park was underwater.

“We were ready to play that show, and I was out here at our place in Medina. It had been raining all night,” he said. “So when I drove into Kerrville, I started hearing the news and seeing the water — a foot from the bridges. I was just stunned. At that point, you just thought about the devastation — losing the buildings along the river. And then the news came about Mystic, and it became a life-changing tragedy.”

They had to leave for a show the next day in Ruidoso, New Mexico, but before the waters had receded on July 5, he and his manager were already making calls. “We immediately just made it so that all of our merch items, 100 percent would go to the relief effort,” he said. “Then we started calling around and finding out who the best entities were to funnel that relief effort and found out it was the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country.”

That’s how it began — with a canceled show, a stunned songwriter and a community in ruins. And a question so many of us asked ourselves in that moment: What can we do?

“We couldn’t take away the sadness and the grief caused by that, but I felt like we could just move forward and do as much as we could for people resurrecting their lives,” Keen said.

Music as Response & Healing — Applause for the Cause

What began as a pledge to donate merch sales quickly grew into a full-scale benefit concert. Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, co-founder of Buc-ee’s, immediately stepped up with a $1 million pledge and sponsorship.

As far as where to hold it, early planning discussions centered on Kerrville’s football stadium. “But that didn’t have the infrastructure we needed,” Keen said. Will Korioth, Whitewater’s operator, offered both the 27th and the 28th for the show. “One day to prepare and one day for the concert.” “Most of the artists on the bill had played at Whitewater. We also felt like it reflected the heart of the Hill Country more than, say, the Alamodome or somewhere in Austin. Being as close to Kerrville as possible was the best route.”

And with that, Applause for the Cause was born.

By then, the lineup had started to take shape. “Most of them, we reached out to,” Keen said. “I called Ryan Bingham. I also reached out to my friend Tyler Childers. Terry Allen’s a friend of mine. And then there were a lot knocking at the door.” The final bill was nothing short of legendary.

“Fortunately, we were a little bit ahead of the game,” Keen told me. “Not to say anything negative—there have been some excellent benefits going on for the whole thing. Still, as far as what we wanted to do to represent Kerrville and the surrounding area, I think we had the bright idea, we had the right timing, and we had some luck. Which is always, always big with anything.”

It was a fitting tribute to Texas and Texas country music, defined loosely and lovingly. The full spectrum of Americana was represented: folk, country, roots-rock, bluegrass, blues, gospel, plus all the regional flavors that make this scene so vibrant.

Even those artists who weren’t physically present showed up in spirit. Songs like “My Hometown”—a nod to the legacy of Charlie Robison — were reprised by Jack Ingram and Keen. Covers and callbacks to Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, George Jones and Kris Kristofferson wove through the setlists, alongside Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Todd Snider, and Pat Green, whose family suffered tragedy in the flood.

As I walked into the venue that day, Max and Heather Stallings were on stage. The hot, humid air weighed heavily, sweat already soaking my shirt. My only goal at first: get a lay of the land and find the shade “sidewalks,” those narrow strips of relief people kept jockeying for as the crowd shifted in the sun.

Extra-large bags of Beaver Nuggets sat on the welcome table next to a stack of little fold-out fans with the Whataburger logo. The ladies running the table told me to take one. I did — fan in one hand, Nuggets in the other — and thought, ‘I’m in Texas heaven.’ That would be a recurring thought throughout the day.

I wandered the grounds and stopped at a booth where you could write a thank-you note to first responders. I jotted a few words of gratitude before moving toward a sliver of shade near the stage.

That’s when Jason Boland stepped out. He opened with “Comal County Blue,” then slid into “Somewhere Down in Texas.” It felt like a benediction for the day:

’Cause no matter how big the storms
I know I can find me a place that’s warm
The sun is shining somewhere in Texas.

It didn’t take long to realize this was no ordinary show. Part concert, part church service, part family reunion — a mix of worship, levity and rowdy joy. You could feel it in the way people talked to each other and in the way the songs stacked up, one after another.

Whitewater Amphitheater itself added to the atmosphere. The river, the trees, the canyon cliffs — all of it formed a backdrop that felt both vast and intimate, and the sound rolled through the open outdoor space cleaner than I expected.

Sarah Jarosz brought a reflective, somber tone with Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells.” Legendary songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Terry Allen walked out with his grandson, Calder. Keen joined them for “Amarillo Highway.” Then Ryan Bingham surprised the crowd, lending his voice to “Give Me a Ride to Heaven (Boy).”

You could tell the musicians were having fun, and many commented on how happy they were just to be there, looking forward to seeing other people play. It was especially cool to watch them react to each other on stage — like when Jamey Johnson chuckled at the humor in Bingham’s latest single, “Americana.”

And then Keen himself stepped out, not as a headliner but as a neighbor. “Music is magical,” he told the crowd. “A binding force like no other that can relieve our grief, warm our hearts and bring strangers together in a celebration of life.” He set the intention plainly: “We want our music to serve as a reminder of this day as it echoes through the canyons of time.”

Then he led thousands of us in “Amazing Grace.” For a moment, the grove fell still — just voices rising together on a pristine Texas evening. It was the stillest moment of the day and the loudest.

The rest of the night was a dance between ache and laughter. Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram and Jon Randall brought both with “Amazing Grace (West Texas),” “Tin Man” and “Like Tequila Does.”

Hayes Carll, Radney Foster and Ray Wylie Hubbard (with his son Lucas on guitar) shifted the mood with songs like “Drunken Poets Dream” and “Snake Farm.” Before tearing into “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” Hubbard gave a quick Texas music history lesson — cosmic cowboys and rednecks, and how Willie Nelson brought everybody under one tent.

The bill built to Cleto Cordero, Randy Rogers, Josh Abbott and William Clark Green. Abbott kicked off with “My Texas Yet,” a list song that works like a love letter, names and places stitched right in.

“West Texas in My Eye,” by Abbott, Green and Cordero, carried vivid imagery of loss with a twinge of endurance. They echoed the paradox of the flood: nature as both destroyer and sustainer.

Cody Jinks, Ryan Bingham and Jamey Johnson followed. Bingham opened with “The Poet.” Johnson delivered “High Cost of Livin.” Jinks answered Hubbard’s earlier history riff with “Hippies and Cowboys.”

Then a jolt: Cross Canadian Ragweed, freshly reunited, kicked down the door with “Alabama,” going right into “Hammer Down.” Cody Canada brought Boland back to sing “17.” They eased into “Soul Agent.”

Canada then turned to the mic. “I heard the Governor was going to be here tonight. So I wanted to play a song for him. Then I heard he didn’t show up.” He shrugged, then blew into his harmonica and the opening notes of “Boys from Oklahoma.” The band’s well-known pro-legalization anthem came with new lyrics that switched the source of Texans’ weed from Mexico to Oklahoma. Then the kicker: “Oh my, oh my, the [expletive] irony. How about we get our [stuff] together, Texas, and legalize the weed.” The crowd roared.

Before the final song of their set, Canada had some closing remarks. “We have to stick together as human beings, not just Texans.” The band then ripped into a Snider cover “Late Last Night,” which had the crowd dancing.

Korioth from Whitewater took the mic to thank the audience, noting this was the biggest show in the venue’s 19-year history. Buc-ee’s even sent the actual beaver mascot on stage to thank the crowd, standing alongside Keen and Austin Dickson, CEO of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country.

Keen returned with “Feeling Good Again,” “Gringo Honeymoon,” and, to my delight, “What I Really Mean.” He teased “a surprise all around” before launching into “Whitehouse Road.” When Tyler Childers himself walked out mid-song, the crowd erupted. Childers ran through “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Country Squire,” “Honky Tonk Flame,” and my personal favorite — “Universal Sound.”

He paused to thank Keen and to thank Texas. “When my mom wondered if music could be a viable career option, I looked at artists like Gary Stewart and Chris Knight, and I saw how good Texas had been to my fellow hillbillies. I knew that if I could make it to Texas and at least get to play a little bit down here, things would be okay. You guys made it alright in my life, and I thank y’all a lot for that,” he said before closing with “Lady May.”

Keen came back to finish it out: “Dreadful Selfish Crime,” “The Road Goes on Forever,” and “I’m Coming Home.” Then Cody Canada joined him for “My Hometown,” less than a week after Keen had appeared at the CCR and Turnpike Troubadours’ big Waco show. The stage filled as others joined in, “I’ll see you around, around my hometown.”
It was a fitting end. The crowd left without much protest once it was clear their chants of “Robert Earl Keen” and “One More Song” would go unanswered. It was past midnight. We had been there all day — tired, salty, sun-kissed. My legs sore, my feet numb, but I was floating.

By the end of the night, the effort had raised $3 million for the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, and the donation link stayed live through Memorial Day for Keen’s Homecoming Weekend celebration.

Keen on Songwriting, Optimism and Americana

I kept thinking about what Keen told me: you can’t take away the pain, but you can help people move forward. That’s what he does. His music resonates not because it’s flashy but because it’s real. It lingers. It matters.

My relationship with Keen’s music didn’t start in a honky-tonk or under a Hill Country sky. I didn’t necessarily grow up with it, just the songs everyone already knew. I came to it the hard way, after I’d left Texas. Living on a Pacific island, missing my people and my place, I’d listen to “When the Bluebonnets Bloom” and feel the seasons I couldn’t see. I’d put on “Feeling Good Again” and imagine floating the river with my friends.

But the one I’ve always held closest was “Not a Drop of Rain.” It’s a song about emotional drought — broken promises, words unsaid, the ache of standing still in a life that’s already moved on. I’ve visited it from time to time, but I really clung to it in the canyon of grief I found myself in during my divorce, when I needed the words for what I couldn’t articulate.

When I told Keen it was my favorite song, he paused, and I could tell he was smiling when he said: “That’s really my favorite, too.”

He shared the story behind it. He wrote it during a stretch of downtime on tour in Nevada. “The thing I hate about touring is not playing. You get these days off, and those days off just kill me, he said.”

“I wrote that during one of those stretches when I had three days off — which is just a nightmare. It’s like, you know, don’t leave a loaded gun around me,” he said with a chuckle. “I was in this lonely place, just trying to put together all the things you think when you come to the end of a relationship. There’s no going back. No retreating. No reward whatsoever.”

I mentioned that I think of that song and “Feelin Good Again” in sort of the same light but almost opposites. He thought it was funny I said that. “Somebody once told me, kind of as a joke, ‘Why didn’t you just call it Not Feeling Good Again?’”

My favorite songs are always ones that are well-written. The ones that put words together in unique ways and tell a deep, layered story in only a few stanzas. That kind of writing isn’t easy.

But Keen told me several of his best ones came easily. “‘Not a Drop of Rain’ was like that. Luck was on my side. Things came together real easy for that song,” he said.
Keen works in words like a painter. “I’m very visual in my thinking when I write a song. I look at it as a picture — foreground and midground and the background, and usually I start with the background. I start by thinking, you know, what’s the skyline? Is it day or is it night? A cityscape? The desert? Mountains? I create that and then I start putting the characters in the middle and get them to move, and then basically the foreground is the lyric itself.”

Maybe that’s why his music resonates. It’s grounded in place, in detail, in the cadence of people who use metaphors like oxygen.

He told me his uncle was like that. From San Angelo, he was a Depression-era storyteller who could hold a room with tales about growing up near Junction in the 1920s, when, as Keen put it, “there was nothing out there.”

“Everybody would be drinking cocktails, and he’d start telling a story, and I’d be the kid sitting at his feet, just riveted, trying to absorb every word,” Keen said.

And then there was his father-in-law from Lytle. “He was a fantastic storyteller,” Keen said. “His metaphors always blew me away. He’d say stuff like, ‘That fireplace is so strong, it’ll pull the hat off your head and suck it up the flu.’”

Keen remembered sitting with him on a porch in Bandera one summer evening. “It was about 105 degrees at six o’clock. We were sitting on the porch, not talking much. He looked down at his flowers and then looked up and said, ‘Do you think my periwinkles are a fraud?’ It was so odd, so funny, and somehow poetic.”

For years, he never wrote without a guitar in his hands. But lately, he has experimented with writing entire lyrics first. “I decided, why can’t I do this without a guitar in my hand?” he said. “I’ll write the whole lyric and then sit down. That’s when the editing comes in — making the rhythm of the words fit with the rhythm of the music. Sometimes you drop or add words to make it work better. But in general, I still like to sit down with a guitar and do it all at one time. Like Guy Clark said, you write with a pencil and a big eraser.”

We also talked about books. Cormac McCarthy came up almost immediately. “I’ve read ‘Stella Maris’ and ‘The Passenger’ six times now,” Keen said. “The darkness in those books is unparalleled, but the brilliance of the language is shocking. You just can’t get enough of it.”

He said he had always counted “Suttree” as his favorite book, but those two have taken top spot. “[McCarthy’s’] gift for the written word is unparalleled,” Keen said.
That influence shows up across his work — songs, poems, and now “Americana Podcast: The 51st State.” I asked him how he defines Americana.

“We’re the ones to drive the ship here, so we just decided we can define it any way we want,” he said with a grin. “I’ve had Terry and Jo Harvey Allen on, who have written plays and done sculpture and painting. I’d like to interview filmmakers, too. Jeff Nichols, who did ‘Mud,’ is on my list. That’s Americana to me: solid location and culture-based stories. We can push the boundaries however we want.”

I told him his music often reads as optimistic even when the lyrics lean heavy. Did he see himself that way?

“What I like to do is portray a certain amount of optimism,” he said. “I would not call myself an optimist. But that doesn’t mean I go around being Mr. Sadsack all the time. And I’m not dark like Cormac [McCarthy] is.”

That’s Keen in a sentence. Not a sad sack, not a blind cheerleader. A poet of the in-between.

Lineage and What Comes Next

Since his debut album, “No Kinda Dancer” in 1984, Keen stood as one of the independent voices that has shaped his generation of Texas music, Americana and alt-country—whatever you want to call it.

Watching him now, with his silver hair and that familiar grin, I couldn’t help but think of my own granddaddy. The kids next to me at Whitewater said it out loud. That felt right. Granddaddy is a compliment here. A term of respect and endearment.

At the Grand Ole Opry this spring, Tyler Childers introduced him with a twist on Keen’s most famous line: “The road goes on forever, and the poetry never ends.” That sums up not only Keen’s career but the lineage of Texas and Americana songwriting itself. That’s what legacy looks like — songs that outlast the singer, passed like a torch from one generation to the next. And those small influences ripple through art, echoing across time.

Without Townes Van Zandt, we might never have heard Willie Nelson introduce “Pancho and Lefty” to a wider audience. Townes’ storytelling set a template for Texas songwriting. Willie, in turn, helped open the door for Waylon Jennings to shatter country’s polished mold and help launch the outlaw movement.

That outlaw spirit — raw, independent, authentic — carried into the Texas country and Red Dirt scenes. Artists like Jason Boland refining the songwriter-first barroom tradition. Bands like Reckless Kelly, who’ve carried rugged, story-driven songs out of the Austin scene since the late 1990s. Younger voices like Vincent Neil Emerson citing Townes, Guy Clark and Steve Earle as guiding stars.

It’s not a straight line. It’s a web of kinship — writers inspired by other writers, each coloring the tradition with their own scars and songs. One artist lights a lantern, another carries it further down the road.

Keen knows he’s part of that continuum, and he’s not finished adding to it. He has a new album coming out soon, called “The Wailing War,” which he describes as lyrically rich and a little mystical. “It’s one you should love if you love words, ’cause it’s got a lot of words,” he told me. “And it’s nice and mystical — sort of like, is it in the Pyrenees Mountains, or is it in the mountains of Mexico? It’s got that feel.”

He’s also pairing a photography book showcasing his impressive guitar collection with his own poems. “I’m still a poet at heart,” he said. “I’ve written a lot of poems over the years. I just don’t publish those. But some of them will be published with this guitar book.”

Where the Water Meets the Song

The Guadalupe will flood again one day. It will dry out again, too. That’s its paradox, and ours. We pray for rain, then curse it. We fear the river, then gather on its banks.
I keep thinking about the testimony, the phrases I wrote down, the faces in the crowd, the cypress roots gripping the river’s edge. Under the weight of a long, hot summer, thousands of us stood together that day and sang the lyrics to songs we know by heart.

It was a place where grief and gratitude sat side by side under the stars. A place to remember, reconnect and — for a few sacred hours — feel good again.
Because water doesn’t flow upstream, but music can. And for one night on the Guadalupe, hope rose higher than the flood.