They paddled canoes to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and mourned the drowned grand pianos in the basement of the Symphony Hall.
As the city's mayor told reporters last week that overall damages to the city-county area will top $1 billion, word came that Nashville's great pickers had lost a virtually priceless part of the city's music-making machinery. Hundreds of instruments - some valued in six figures - were lost to flooding when the out-of-control Cumberland River overflowed its banks into Soundcheck, a pro-level rehearsal and storage hall.
With stars such as Brad Paisley, Keith Urban and guitar-hound Vince Gill losing big chunks of their collections, the disastrous flooding in middle Tennessee, inevitably, took on a music angle.
"There's almost no prominent guitar-playing artists who didn't get hit by this," Joe Glaser, guitar repairman to the stars, said last week from Nashville. "Then there were people who had maybe six upright basses, but it was their life savings."
In the first days of flooding following 13 inches of rain last weekend, the tragic deaths of those caught unprepared occupied most of middle Tennessee's attention. When the water rolled back, the damage to Music City's far-flung attractions started to become clear.
Always a tough-but-magical town, Nashville is still waking up to the full ravages of days of rain. No one is sure what's left to be found.
More than 100 firefighters and police officers were on foot going door to door in flood-ravaged neighborhoods late last week to check on residents and offer help, Nashville-Davidson County officials said.
"People are in shock," said Linda Bryant, a graduate student and freelance writer who lives near Music Row, Vanderbilt University and downtown. "I think it's only started to hit people."
It's the worst case, historians say, since the Great Flood of 1927. The National Weather Service said that when the Cumberland crested at nearly 52 feet a week ago - 12 feet above flood stage - it was the highest level since the Army Corps of Engineers built its dam system on the river in the early '60s. The mighty dams that had protected Nashville for half a century weren't up to this task.
"It's a catastrophe and people are just starting to wake up to that," Bryant said. "The economic impact is massive, and people can't wrap their minds around it."
The players keep playing
Economic engines such as the Opryland Hotel and the Opry Mills mall are closed for indeterminate periods. The Country Music Hall of Fame took on water in its basement and had damage to its theater but none of its legendary memorabilia - such as Elvis' Cadillac and Bill Monroe's mandolin - was damaged, spokeswoman Liz Thiels said.
Despite the engulfment of the Opry House, the Grand Ole Opry's home since the 1970s, the famed radio show continued weekend performances at two of its historic locations, the Ryman Auditorium and the War Memorial Auditorium.
"The Opry never missed a beat," Thiels said.
Christie Carter, manager of the Gruhn Guitar vintage instruments shop just blocks from the Cumberland, said some downtown locations pumped out basements full of water, only to have them fill up again when neighboring businesses did the same thing.
"All our neighbors were flooding each other," Carter said, adding that Gruhn, where valuable old instruments adorn wall after wall, escaped damage.
Even areas like Bryant's neighborhood, which had no water damage, got hit by downed old-growth trees and other effects of the high winds that accompanied the weekend storms.
Try to salvage guitars
From downtown high-rises to leafy suburbs, flood news and some tall tales continued to spread all last week via word of mouth, local and national media and social networks. Nearby Clarksville, home to the 101st Airborne Division, saw its downtown fill with water. The NFL Tennessee Titans' downtown stadium became a big pond before starting to dry.
At least one journalist set aside his cameras to rescue a retired football coach in the flooded suburb of Bellevue. And piranhas, people swore, escaped from a restaurant fish tank at Opry Mills mall and were swimming around the parking lot.
Glaser, the guitar guru, was working with others this week to set up triage for the damaged guitars they will attempt to salvage from the Cumberland's water. He'd heard one encouraging story: about a vintage Stratocaster that had floated for a week in Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. It had been carefully disassembled, slowly dried and put back together to twang again.
Next to the 18 people or more who died in Tennessee and the billion dollars in damage, the fate of damaged instruments may seem of little concern. But modern-day Nashville, a town built on music, will surely need musicians armed with axes as it rises to its feet again.
