John Prine. Jerry Jeff Walker. Jimmy Buffett. Billy Joe Shaver. Neal Casal. Jeff Austin. Col. Bruce Hampton. Peter Cooper. Some of these important personages and master musicians died of natural old age, some through tragic happenstance, some through untreated mental health struggles and personal spirals. But one thing they had in common was they were all close friends and confidantes of Americana star and brilliant folk singer Todd Snider. He lost most of them in the space of barely four years. Snider, 59 years old and living on borrowed time even according to himself, joined them last Friday in whatever afterlife is promised for truth-telling troubadours and hard-living, open-hearted artists.
When I spoke with Snider just as the pandemic was lifting, he was grieving his two primary mentors - Prine and Walker - who’d died in rapid succession. Fate was on his mind. “It was a really hard winter. I’m 54 and a half and my dad died when he was 54,” he said, letting the implication hang in the air. “John and Jerry Jeff really helped me a lot. Like John flat out would tell me what to do sometimes. I miss him. I don't know who I'll play this record for, you know? [2022’s First Agnostic Church of Hope And Wonder] I was thinking about that as we're making it, because those are usually my two people I send it to. Like, that’s my audience.”
Since then, Snider’s had some good runs of shows, released two studio albums, and completed an ambitious project re-recording and re-releasing his catalog of songs. Yet in those same recent years, friends have said they’ve been concerned about his health and well-being. He told Rolling Stone in October that his life was “all heartache” and that he was feeling very much like the title of his final album High, Lonesome And Then Some with pregnant lines like ““It’s hard to be happy, even when nothing’s wrong.”
Just days after that piece was published, things spiraled out of control while on the road in Salt Lake City, UT. There’s no definitive account, but according to a researched timeline on the news site Saving Country Music, trouble began when Snider’s team reported that he’d been violently assaulted outside his hotel in Salt Lake City just before the first date of a much-anticipated tour, yet exactly what happened is still unclear. The show on Nov. 1 was cancelled abruptly, as was the tour a couple of days later. In a blur of events, Snider turned aggressive upon not being admitted to a hospital and was arrested. Body cam footage shows Snider saying repeatedly that he could not breathe. After being released from custody, he flew back to Nashville where he was admitted to two hospitals in dire and deteriorating condition. Some time on Friday, Nov. 14, overcome with pneumonia and sepsis, he died in a coma, surrounded by family and friends. Some close to him believe that he was failed by several systems and that his death could have been prevented.
Grim details aside, this weekend’s outpouring of grief and disbelief, from his beloved East Nashville through his trans-national fan base, celebrated Todd Snider’s genius as a performer and songwriter.
“He was an artist in the truest sense of the word. He followed his muse” says Nashville journalist Daryl Sanders, an intimate friend for years and curator of the Snider Files, a subscription Substack that ran through 2024. “When I went through the process of ranking his Top 50 songs, I narrowed that down from 180, and I just remember being more and more and more impressed with his writing. Obviously humor was one of his main devices, but I do think that he was using humor to talk about very serious things.”
Music City denizens were also effusive in remembering how Snider energized East Nashville’s 21st century identity as an enclave of art and culture - our Left Bank or East Village. His pivotal album East Nashville Skyline of 2004 captured the bohemian flux of the 37206 zip code in its title song:
Crossing the river, we play 'em our songs
They're probably right when they say
We're all wrong for these days
So much for money, so much for big
Who needs the trouble when there's always a gig
At the café, the Radio Café
The Radio Cafe was the nexus of late 90s East Nashville, a hangout for sound man/bouncer/scenester Skip Litz, Todd’s dear friend (also late great) who inspired his indelible “Play A Train Song.” Snider anchored the influential 2006 Red Beet Records compilation The Other Side: Music From East Nashville, contributing the first and last tracks on the 31-song double CD. A few years later, Snider took over caretaking of The Purple Building, centrally located at Five Points, turning it into the neighborhood’s great creative clubhouse of the past decade.
In those ways and more, Snider encouraged many aspiring songwriters to move to the East Side, says his friend the songwriter and band leader Allen Thompson. “Folks have said that they came here and knew this was the neighborhood or the section of town and they had to be closest to, because of Todd, whether it was directly or just from the records,” Thompson told me. “That definitely speaks to Todd's desire to create that community, especially as he got older. You know he was really grateful, really grateful to Jerry Jeff and Billy Joe Shaver and Guy (Clark) and Jimmy Buffett and John Prine for taking him under their wings and inviting him to become a part of their community, and he really really wanted to make sure that he kept that tradition. One of the most important parts of the folk tradition is the folks.”
Todd’s longtime friend and virtual personal photographer Stacie Huckeba wrote on Facebook this weekend that he’d encouraged her to come to Nashville and that “he came through as my biggest cheerleader, highest confidant, way too early alarm clock, and ass busting motivator. He pushed me, challenged me, and encouraged me in the way that only he could.”
Margo Price bolstered that narrative of loving support from behind the scenes: “He would often send me encouraging emails that always lifted my spirits when I was feeling low and like an outsider/weirdo.” Songwriter Jon Latham wrote, “You were the touchstone to guys like me. Your name belonged next to all the greats, but what made you different was the fact that you considered yourself one of us, and you looked upon us as one of you.”
Snider grew up in Beaverton, OR near Portland. Any hopes his family may have had for a conventional life for Todd went out the window when he saw Jerry Jeff Walker perform a solo show at Gruene Hall in the mid 1980s, when he was turning 20. It was the epiphany that gave him one of his best go-to lines - that Walker “made me see that the difference between a free spirit and a freeloader is three chords on the guitar.”
Snider went deep into the art and craft, studying those canonical writers who’d later become friends and supporters, including Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark. It was a move to Memphis and the support of songwriter Keith Sykes that helped him get established. Jimmy Buffett gave him his first record deal. And when the Americana format was conceived in the mid 90s, Snider, then more of a roots rocker than a solo troubadour, became one of its prime young stars. Numerous artists of all strata would record his songs, including Gary Allen, Robert Earl Keen, and Garth Brooks.
In the 2000s, by then living in East Nashville, he largely dropped his band and toured non-stop as a solo performer, indeed one of the most magnetic and entertaining acoustic acts of all time. He assembled a large and loyal audience, even as he released at least 20 albums, live or studio, between 1994’s debut Songs For The Daily Planet and last month. His side projects included his Nashville-based garage band the Eastside Bull Dogs and the supergroup the Hard Working Americans with Casal and Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools.
During the Covid pause, Snider went online from the Purple Building, and despite the lack of a live in-the-room audience, he continued to nourish and nurture his fan base with a series on YouTube called variously What It Is, The Get Together, and The First Agnostic Church of Hope And Wonder, which became the title of one of his finest and most innovative albums. In the process, he performed and recorded all of the songs from his studio albums in order and then released them, with refreshed stories, as “Purple Versions.” This makes for a remarkable and timely overview of Snider’s range and shaggy brilliance.
“The initial inspiration was just, hey, ‘I should perform every album’ as a way to kind of organize what he was going to do each week. And I think it turned into something obviously more than that,” Sanders says. “He told me that, you know, in some cases, he liked some of those recordings better than the studio (versions).”
Those songs range from the tried and true crowd pleasers like “Alright Guy” and his deft and fabulously satirical “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” to lesser known gems like “Too Soon To Tell,” which Sanders counts among his very favorites. Even Snider’s most provocative material like the jaw-dropping “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White, American Males” sounded more personal and observational than political. He had a wide-ranging fan base, but he never catered to or against anyone. One of his recorded stories, setting up his Grunge Rock takedown said a lot. He was having trouble getting or keeping record deals in the 90s because of the hot trend surging out of the Pacific Northwest.
“You should do what’s happening,” the suits told him. “And I just didn’t want to.”
