When there’s a disaster on the coasts, almost one of the first thing organized is the celebrity-spattered TV benefit show. It’s almost a reflexive action: How else can creative respond to a tragedy than the old adage of putting on a show.
Hence, the big concerts for Hurricane Sandy, Katrina and 9/11 (there’s one forthcoming for the Boston Marathon bombing).
But when tragedy happens in the middle of the country, there seems to be considerably less fuss. The explosion in West, Texas — Where was that benefit concert? Or the ones for Joplin? Sinkholes? Wildfires?
Well, it may have only been the luck that one of NBC’s biggest stars, the country singer Blake Shelton, one of the judges on “The Voice,” and his Oklahoma roots that led to the hasty staging of “Healing in the Heartland” Wednesday in Oklahoma City.
As such, he invited a number of country stars to perform and still others to record pleas for donations. Vince Gill, Reba McEntire, a couple of guys from Rascal Flats and Darius Rucker all performed in the hour. Seen in taped spoken segments were Oklahoma native Carrie Underwood, Alicia Keys, Jay Leno, Jimmie Johnson, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, and Toby Keith, who does a terrible job reading his cue cards.
The big star seemed to be a young galoot, Luke Bryant, interacting with the auditorium audience. But near everyone sang the same sort of mid-tempo approach. Emotions were raw when Shelton’s wife, the country hitmaker, sang a version of her hit “The House That Built Me.” But she got so choked up she couldn’t do whole verses of the song. She asked fans in the audience to help her out and carry the song, but few did (at least from the sound mix we were getting at home).
Screams from the crowd could be heard, though, when Usher strolled out to sing-along on a hit. He was a rare commodity and it was due to their working together on “The Voice.”