OWENSBY: There was a church, Harpeth Heights Baptist, that put up a tent at the end of our street. After the first few days when everybody, all the restaurants, quit bringing food and that kind of thing, they were still there. And it became the community discussion and news and find-out-what’s-going-on point and also you could get something to eat. They stayed for months—I mean, they stayed until August or September, they stayed all summer. They didn’t know us, we don’t belong to their church, they just were there. The level of stuff that total strangers did was amazing. One of my friends showed up driving somebody else’s truck and said, “This belongs to so-and-so and he lives nearby, let’s put some of your stuff over there.” So we loaded the truck up with clothes that had been hanging in the closet—the water was about high enough that if you had clothing hanging in the closet, it would be about chest high, so it all had to be washed. So we loaded a full size pick up, as full as it would go with clothes on hangers, just stacking and dumping them in there, and dropped it in this guy’s garage. And we came back with the second load and his wife had already started washing them. There were clothing hanging all over, she must have done 20 loads of wash for us. Never met them in our lives. But it’s just amazing, people show up and do stuff for you.
Excerpted from: Craig Owensby Oral History Interview. Born-digital recording(s) converted to mp3 format for online access in 2012 from 16bit 44.1khz WAV file archival master recording.
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