Playing Music, Building Houses

As the history of Asheville is written, residents and visitors alike would be remiss to overlook the impact of the man named Warren Haynes.

Born in Asheville, Haynes grew up playing guitar in local bands before catching the eye of honky-tonk outlaw singer David Allen Coe. Haynes toured with Coe’s band for four years, a time when he also co-wrote what became Garth Brooks’ 1991 top hit Two of a Kind, Working on a Full House.

In 1989 Haynes joined The Allman Brothers Band, with whom he worked steadily over the years while also forming his own group, Gov’t Mule. After the death of Jerry Garcia he was asked to tour with many of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead.

Despite all that, what enshrines Haynes as an Asheville treasure is the Christmas Jam, an annual music show that began 30 years ago over the Christmas holiday.

Getting together to play

Haynes says the first jam was just his effort to get musician friends together to jam when they all came home because many bands defer touring over the holidays.

“We were just looking at it like a one-time thing, and then we did it again, and then it grew,” he said recently in an interview with SML.

“The first one was really more about getting all these musicians together to play music and have some fun around the Christmas holiday. The money was kind of an afterthought. ‘Oh, we’ll take the small amount of money we raise and donate it to charity,’” he remembers. “The main impetus was to get all of us together to play music. Then, ‘Oh, that was cool, let’s do it again next year.’ Then it just seemed to build its own steam, which was really nice,” Haynes said in a conversation from his New York home.

The event grew to become a musical phenomena, bringing an ever-changing cast of renowned musicians to Asheville each December to play in the US Cellular Center, with almost all proceeds going to the Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity.

Over the years, the annual fundraiser has put $2.3 million into the local Habitat coffers. Concert proceeds have built nearly 40 Habitat homes “and helped offset infrastructure and development costs for entire Habitat neighborhoods in the Asheville area,” the organization notes.

Haynes says the bedrock of his work to support Habitat stems from the basic belief that everyone deserves to have a home.

Growing up in Asheville, “there was always a sense of how important home is, how important friends and family are, how important just the interaction among human beings is,” Haynes said. “I started traveling at a pretty young age,” he said. Seeing the world “just kind of makes you keenly aware of how important all those basic ingredients” of home and friends and family are, “to your own personal happiness, and I think that applies … pretty much to everyone.”

Habitat takes basic human needs and makes them reality, Haynes said. “It’s a wonderful organization (that has) been a huge inspiration to us, and I feel really honored to be connected to them. From the time we began working together, my appreciation for what they do has only grown,” he said.

In the community and among musicians, “more and more people are getting involved and the Christmas Jam, at this point, has inspired a lot of people from out of town or out of state to get involved with the Western North Carolina Habitat program” or their own Habitat organization back home. 

“That’s a beautiful thing,” he said.

More that building houses

Yet the impact Christmas Jam has had on Asheville goes far beyond music building houses. 

“It would be impossible to quantify how deeply Warren Haynes has inspired and bolstered his hometown,” says Dodie Stephens, director of communications with Explore Asheville, the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau.

“The collaborative, creative and community orientated nature of music in Asheville has been alive and well for many years and Haynes has played an immeasurable role bringing musicians together and giving Asheville such a treasured platform,” she added.

Asked about the Asheville of his youth, Haynes replied: “When we were growing up, there wasn’t always an abundance of things to do, so in a lot of cases you had to create those things. We all spent tons of time driving around the Blue Ridge Parkway, going to Buzzard Rock—such a beautiful scenic place that so many of us just spent time hanging out,” he said.

“I guess we all took for granted how beautiful that part of the country is, but we were definitely enthralled by it. Those things were inspiring.”

But the Asheville of his memory was also a dying town. Many of the storefronts around Pritchard Park were empty, and major streets—Lexington Avenue, Broadway Street and Biltmore Avenue—were home to just a handful of thriving businesses.

Many people spent years helping bring Asheville back from that brink, but Christmas Jam—bringing top musicians to town and attracting hundreds of thousands of music fans from around the world to visit Asheville for one- or two-night epic music marathons that often ran more than eight hours a night—had an impact that is undeniable.

Of course The Allman Brothers Band came to support Warren’s charity concert, but over the years so too did Peter Frampton, Sheryl Crow, the Steve Miller Band, Dave Matthews, The Avett Brothers, Jason Isbell, Ralph Stanley, Hot Tuna, The Doobie Brothers, Johnny Winter, Del McCoury, Joan Osborne, Travis Tritt, Widespread Panic, Phil Lesh & Friends, Blues Traveler, Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford, Ann Wilson of Heart, Bob Weir, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jackson Browne, Hawaiian ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro, Ray LaMontagne, Marty Stuart, Ivan Neville, Little Feat, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Los Lobos, Bela Fleck and John Paul Jones, the bassist in Led Zeppelin who flew in from England solely to play the Jam and entertain the crowd over two nights with energetic and mesmerizing mandolin playing.

As the annual show grew in popularity, Haynes says it became obvious that “we can continue this and make it grow and it’s all organic and it all feels good. It was an opportunity that we weren’t previously aware existed. So now, when I think about how much the whole thing is grown beyond our wildest imagination, it just sort of happened because that opportunity was there to make it happen because of all these amazing musicians that have contributed year after year after year.”

‘What a beautiful place’

“When I first started touring, in the late 70s, early 80s, no matter where I was, invariably I would run into someone who would say, ‘where are you from?’ and I would always say Asheville, North Carolina. At that time, nobody knew anything about Asheville. It would be, ‘Oh, I’m not familiar with that,’” Haynes said.

“In the past 15 or 20 years, to an obviously increasing amount, when I said Asheville, everybody would say, ‘Oh, I love Asheville. My wife and I went there. My father-in-law bought a place there.’ Everybody now has a story about Asheville, because it’s kind of resurrected itself in this really nice, honest, bohemian way that represents the community that we all experienced but was much smaller back then. That’s just grown organically, and I think it’s great that, every where I go I meet people who are falling in love with Asheville,” he said.

“I remember being on the West Coast … decades ago and seeing an ad on the television for the Biltmore House and realizing, maybe for the first time, that maybe it wasn’t just special in our area, that it was special to anyone. That’s the way the mountains of North Carolina are, that’s the way that whole region is. There are a lot of beautiful places in this world, but when people experience that, which is what we all grew up kind of taking for granted, it hits them the way it should, which is, ‘Wow, what a beautiful place,’” Haynes said.