“The Night They Sang in a Church Without a Roof”. In 1978, a storm swept through Staunton and tore the roof off the small church where The Statler Brothers had once practiced as young boys. The next morning, they came back — not with a film crew or an audience, but as four men standing quietly amid the ruins. Don set an old microphone back on the wet wooden pulpit. Harold looked around and softly said, “We started here once… maybe we should sing here again.” They began to sing “Amazing Grace.” There was no applause — only the sound of the wind slipping through broken windows. But soon, people from the nearby houses began to stop and listen — an old woman, a few children, then families, and finally the whole town. When the song ended, the morning light broke through the clouds and fell upon the lone wooden cross still standing behind them. Harold whispered, “God didn’t take the music away — He just changed the place where we’d find it.”
In the spring of 1978, a fierce storm swept through Staunton, Virginia — the kind that tore down fences, uprooted…