How has it already been 9 years?
Today marks the ninth anniversary of the devastating attack on the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, when a gunman opened fire on the music festival from the nearby Mandalay Bay Hotel and left 60 dead and hundreds more wounded.
I still remember so much about October 1, 2017. I was getting ready to go to bed when I saw a post from Luke Combs, who had headlined the “Next From Nashville” stage earlier that day, about a shooting at the festival and letting his fans know he was safe. From there I couldn’t stop refreshing Twitter for updates as I watched the news get worse and worse while authorities frantically tried to track down the shooter.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about that day: Why did the 64-year old gunman choose to fire over 1,000 rounds into the music festival of innocent people before taking his own life? How did he manage to get 24 guns and 6,000 rounds of ammo into his hotel room without anybody noticing? And what caused someone with no apparently ideology or motive to commit the worst mass shooting in American history?
Eric Church performed at the Harvest Festival on Friday night, just two days before the Sunday night massacre. And after seeing some of his own fans killed in the attack, including Sonny Melton who was buried in an Eric Church t-shirt, he had some of his own questions about the tragedy.
Just a few days after the shooting, Church took the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, where he turned some of those questions he had into a powerful new song called “Why Not Me.”
Visibly shaken and emotional, Church explained that he didn’t really want to be on stage that night, but he decided to be there after he learned that Melton and his wife had bought tickets to see him at the Opry before the shooting:
“I didn’t want to be here tonight, and I didn’t want to play guitar, and I don’t want to walk on this stage. But last night – let me try to get this out – last night somebody sent me a video of a lady named Heather Melton, and she was talking to Anderson Cooper on CNN and she had on our Church Choir tour shirt.
And he said ‘What brought you to Vegas?’ And she goes ‘We went there to see Eric Church because he was Sonny’s,’ her husband who died, ‘It was his guy, and we went there to see his guy.’ And and then she said we have tickets for the Grand Ole Opry tomorrow night.
Over here, Section 3 Row F, there’s some empty seats, and that’s their seats.
And I’ll tell you something – the reason I’m here tonight is because of Heather Melton, her husband Sonny who died, and every person that was there. Because I’m gonna tell you something… I saw that crowd, I saw them with their hands in the air, I saw them with boots in the air, and what I saw, that moment in time that was frozen, there’s no amount of bullets that can take away. None.”
Church then debuted his powerful new song “Why Not Me,” which found the singer questioning why so many innocent people lost their lives, and why he was spared:
“Why you with your long brown hair flowing
And you with your fresh tattooed skin
And you from the Western Virginia
That you’ll never get to see again
As darkness descended the desert
And a bad actor starred in his play
Why you from Tennessee did life capture
And me from Tennessee get away
And when the morning sun hit the mountain
And a glorious still calmed the breeze
I asked the God of all knowing wisdom
Why you and why not me?”
It was the only time Church performed the song until 2025, when he once again took the stage at the Opry for their 100th anniversary. But it’s clear just how much the Vegas shooting impacted Church: He spoke about it extensively during his residency at his Nashville bar, Chief’s, and even referenced it during his latest song “On the Road.”
Of course we all have a lot of unanswered questions about that terrible night, questions we probably won’t get answers to until we too meet “the God of all-knowing wisdom.” But until then, we can all remember those who tragically lost their lives on that horrific night in October, nine years ago today.
Never forget.
