On the evening of June 4, 2019, Granger Smith was in the backyard of his home in Georgetown, Texas, with all three of his children. He was due in Nashville for the CMT Music Awards, and after that a summer of touring. He later described it as a quiet summer evening around seven o’clock, with no music playing.
His daughter, London, 7, was practicing gymnastics. His sons, Lincoln, 5, and River, 3, were chasing each other with water guns. Four years later, in his memoir Like a River, Smith went back to that evening in more detail than he had ever told it before. It is the book’s first chapter.
The evening before Nashville
After dinner, Smith had asked his wife, Amber, to take the boys inside. She had had a long day and wanted a shower and a few minutes to herself, so she said no. She later admitted that for a long time she blamed herself for that answer. Smith has said she never once blamed him.
Watching London, he had a thought he would repeat for years.
“Soak up this moment because it’s not going to last forever.”
Fifteen feet from the gate
The family took pool safety seriously. As soon as they moved into the house, they built a fence around the pool with a child-locked gate. Smith later said the chain of events that put River inside that gate alone should have been close to impossible. But while his father’s back was turned, River squeezed through to refill his water gun and fell into the water.
Nobody heard a thing. Smith noticed the quiet, asked where River was, jumped the fence and found his son face down in the pool.
“I was 15 feet from that water, doing gymnastics.”
Somewhere between 30 seconds and three minutes, he estimated, he and Amber were inside the pool gate doing CPR. London’s scream had brought Amber running out of the house. Paramedics needed about 10 minutes to arrive, and by then, Smith said, River had gone too long without oxygen.
Two days at Dell Children’s
River was taken to Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin. Three different neurological specialists told the family he had no chance of brain recovery. He died two days later.
Granger and Amber decided to donate his organs. Amber later wrote that family and hospital staff lined the hallway for an honor walk. They told the team River loved to go fast, so the staff pushed him down that hall faster than they had ever pushed anyone. His organs went to two adults, a 49-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man.
On June 6, Smith told his fans that the family had lost their youngest son, River Kelly Smith. River was laid to rest on June 11. In the days after his death, London asked her father how many days her brother had lived. Just over a thousand, he told her.
Back on the road
Within three weeks, Smith was back onstage at the Country LakeShake festival in Chicago, with a new tattoo of River’s name on his right forearm. He sang “Heaven Bound Balloons,” a song he had written before the accident, and at the end of the show he pulled River’s Lightning McQueen toy from his pocket. Two days later, he and Amber presented a check for $218,791 to Dell Children’s, money raised from a tribute T-shirt sold through his Yee Yee Apparel line.
Inside, Smith was coming apart. He replayed the scene every time he closed his eyes, and every time he opened his computer he found strangers blaming him for the accident. To get through the nights, he turned to alcohol and marijuana. Self-help stopped working, he said, because it takes a strength he no longer had.
The night in Boise
Chapter Seven of Like a River is about the night he almost ended his own life. After a show in Boise, Idaho, he went out drinking with his bandmates and returned alone to the back bedroom of his tour bus. The images of River in the pool would not stop.
“That was just as rock bottom as it got, to be honest.”
What broke through, he later said, was a sudden picture of Lincoln and London at home. He saw their faces and cried out for Jesus to help him. In her own memoir, Amber writes that he fell asleep on the bathroom floor of the bus that night, and that the next morning he texted her that he had drunk far too much.
He kept the rest to himself. Amber learned how close she had come to losing him years later, when he described that chapter while pitching the book to publishers. Smith has said he was ashamed of it.
Writing it down, and walking away
Smith has said that songwriting always let him skate around the subject, and that was no longer enough. The book made him write the pool scene in full and confess the night in Boise. Like a River came out on August 1, 2023, and became a New York Times bestseller.
By then he had already announced that its companion tour, also called Like a River, would be his last. On April 11, 2023, after 24 years on the road, he said he felt a strong desire to pursue ministry and would serve his local church near Austin while studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He played his final shows in Texas on August 26, 2023. He now serves as a Southern Baptist minister.
In 2021, Granger and Amber welcomed another son, Maverick. Because of River, Amber said, they put him in swim lessons early, and the couple have spent the years since urging other parents to take water safety seriously.
If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.