SAN ANTONIO – Robert Earl Keen, who owns a ranch just outside Kerrville, is lending his talents in an upcoming concert that will benefit many of his Hill Country neighbors impacted by last week’s floods.
As of July 10, 96 people were killed due to the July 4 flooding in Kerr County. In neighboring Kendall County, the county’s office of emergency management said eight additional bodies have been recovered.
“My hometown, Kerrville, Texas, was hit especially hard, and the loss of life there has touched everyone in Kerr County and beyond,” Keen said in a video and post to his Facebook page. “Although the emergency first responders were on the scene without hesitation, the devastation is overwhelming.”
Keen said the concert will be held on Aug. 28 at the Whitewater Amphitheater, which is located along the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels.
“We must help everyone as much as we can for as long as we can,” Keen said.
The country music artist teased that the benefit concert would feature a “star-studded lineup” that would begin in the mid-afternoon and end “far into the night.”
More details on the concert would be released “within a week,” Keen said.
While Keen and his band remain on tour, he also announced that 100% of his tour’s merchandise sales will also be donated to flood victims.
In a separate interview published July 9 with Rolling Stone, Keen said his daughters, Clara and Chloe, spent some of their summers beginning in the late 2000s at Camp Mystic.
Kerr County officials said Thursday that five campers and one counselor from Camp Mystic remain unaccounted for.
“I just found out that my youngest daughter, Chloe … a cabin that washed away was the cabin that she stayed in when she was first there, and she has a definite visceral connection to this tragedy,“ Keen told the magazine. ”My older daughter went there for eight years, and she just loved it. And, for me, the connection was that you didn’t get to have phone calls with your kids, so you just wrote letters. That was a different kind of a connection.”
Clara Keen, one of Robert’s daughters, also spoke to Rolling Stone about her childhood experience at Camp Mystic.
“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 Keen said. “That was an extension of how my parents were already raising my sister and me.”
Keen was scheduled to perform during the City of Kerrville’s Fourth on the River celebration last Friday at Louise Hays Park. However, according to the magazine, the floods washed out the park’s festival grounds, stage and production equipment.
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