Robert Earl Keen, the longtime country singer-songwriter, lives in Kerrville and his two daughters attended Camp Mystic growing up.
DALLAS — The devastating Hill Country floods hit close to home for a Texas music icon.
Robert Earl Keen, the longtime country singer-songwriter, lives in Kerrville and his two daughters attended Camp Mystic growing up. Keen and his family were fortunately safe from the floods.
Keen, who was scheduled to play Kerrville’s Fourth on the River celebration before the floods hit, sprung into action, sharing a now widely-viewed video promoting the The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country’s flood relief fund and announcing that 100% of his merch proceeds would go toward the relief efforts. Keen also promoted and donated two premium tables to an upcoming show to fellow artist Josh Weathers’ flood relief auction (Weathers’ concert livestream and auction ultimately raised more than $400,000).
Now, Keen is going one step further: On Wednesday night, he announced a benefit concert scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 28 at the Whitewater Amphitheater near New Braunfels. Full details, including the lineup, will be announced soon.
“We must help everyone as much as we can for as long as we can,” Keen said Wednesday night.
Keen said the benefit concert will feature a “star-studded lineup” with music starting in the mid-afternoon and “lasting far into the night.”
Keen and his daughter Clara shared more about his family’s connection to Camp Mystic in an interview with Rolling Stone this week. He said his daughter Chloe had stayed at a cabin that washed away in the floods during one of her first years at the camp. Clara was also a longtime camper at Mystic as a kid, spending eight summers there.
“Mystic allowed me to grow into myself, on my terms but with the help of good-natured guidance that was structurally integrated into the camp,” Clara told Rolling Stone. “That was an extension of how my parents were already raising my sister and me. Looking back, I realize Mystic shaped innumerable aspects of my character, to the point where Berton Brayley’s ‘Prayer of a Sportsman’ is the only poem I know by heart, as it was recited after every team game at camp.”
Keen said his whole family has been trying to help this week – him from the road on tour, and his wife back home in Kerrville.
“You can’t take away what happened,” Keen told Rolling Stone. “You can only go forward, and do as much as you can, for as long as you can.”