Ed Snodderly

t’s possible that Ed Snodderly was put on Earth just to remind us how delightfully weird folk music can be.

The Tennessee native looks a bit like Doc from Back to the Future with shorter hair and Buddy Holly glasses. His voice is the sonic equivalent of an old denim shirt, creased and worn and reassuring. He makes clawhammer banjo and drums sound like the most obvious combination in the world.

In the 30-plus years since he first appeared onstage, Snodderly has made the music biz rounds. He left Tennessee in the early ‘70s to pursue a solo career, but returned in 1976 so he could found The Down Home Pickin’ Parlor in Johnson City. He has continued to run the now-venerable venue—a Concert Window partner—and also made time to record two albums as part of the bluegrass duo Brother Boys, record his own music, and make an appearance in the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Snodderly’s most recent release, Little Egypt And Other Attractions, is a fitting distillation of the man’s abilities. While “folk” doesn’t quite capture Snodderly’s essence—he is more like a singer-songwriter steeped in country and bluegrass—he is nevertheless finely tuned to the eccentricities of traditional music. At times he sounds like a countryfied Tom Waits, and at others he reaches back through the ages to channel his ancestors, tobacco and cattle farmers of East Tennessee.Little Egypt And Other Attractions kicks off with the driving, slightly manic “Johnson City Rag,” an ode to the music-rich city where Snodderly makes his home. The album meanders through dive bars and overgrown railroad tracks, with the occasional stop for a bit of poetry: “You’re like the wind blowing through my mind/ You’re like a star shining in the night/ You’re like a knife I’ll never trade/ You’re the shine comin’ off the blade.” It ends with the jaunty “A Life Of My Own,” a wry celebration of life’s freeing randomness.

Whatever you want to call him—Alt-Country Singer? Old-Time Musician? Folkie?—Ed Snodderly is proof that Southern music, with all its old peculiarities, is alive and kicking. - Amelia Mason

It might seen an odd collection of themes, but Ed Snodderly finds himself circling back to them.

Shoe strings. Leather. Old wooden boxes. Trinkets. On they’re own, they’re random objects that may seem to merit no more attention than that paid to a nondescript bag sitting on the side of the interstate while cars zip by at 75 mph. But in Snodderly’s hands — and specifically, in his song lyrics — they become objects of wonder.
“The metaphor of shoes, the metaphor of trains, the metaphor of shade trees — I think there’s just a lot of metaphors I keep investigating,” Snodderly told The Daily Times this week. “I want my songs to have some depth. I’m always trying to make a better song than I have, and I’m also trying to make them for the purpose of making a good song. The challenge is to communicate, to make something that somebody might latch onto.

“There’s an obligation in some ways to try to put it into some kind of explanation that helps us stay connected. I think that’s an important thing that music is trying to do.”

Snodderly, who opens for Leon Russell on Saturday night at “The Shed” in Maryville, is one of those colorful characters of Appalachian music lore who occupies the same tier as Malcolm Holcombe, a similarly talented soul from the North Carolina side of the mountains. His roots to this area run deep — his grandfather was an Old Time fiddler, and his family’s band, featuring Snodderly’s father on guitar and his uncles on piano, fiddle and banjo, used to play square dances in the 1930s on alternating weekends with a young Roy Acuff.

“The earliest memory of music I have is being asked by my mother when I was 12 if I wanted to learn to play the guitar,” Snodderly said. “My grandfather and my uncles would play at family reunions, and I got interested in the guitar when I was 12. Once I got to playing it, I paid attention to it more. Actually, the earliest memory is of my dad sitting me down at the kitchen table and teaching me G, C and D and telling me to get the chords to where I could change them quick enough.

“There was just a whole culture of music, and a dynamic of my family and the making of the music. I come from the world culture of music — that pop kind of thing, and that other side of just making music under a shade tree. I like the dynamic of those two, and I think they’ve helped me to stay balanced in some ways.”

As his musical tastes grew more refined, he gravitated toward songwriters who traded in authenticity — the men and women whose original music indicated they were more than familiar with Bob Wills or the Carter Family or Jerry Lee Lewis, whose voice and lyrics told of deeper ties that bound them to an older world. Such territory is where Snodderly thrives, and it set him on a wandering path as a younger man.

In the 1970s, Snodderly signed with Philo Records, moved to Boston and then to the West Coast. In 1976, he returned home and helped a friend open a music room that’s become a Johnson City institution: The Down Home Pickin’ Parlor, which has provided a stage for some of the most talented roots and Americana artists from around the country over the years. In the 1990s, he formed the duo The Brother Boys with Eugene Wolf, and the two recorded three albums on the Sugar Hill label; around the same time, he began to get noticed as a songwriter and performer of certain affectations.

Other artists have recorded his songs — Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and John Cowan among them — and he even parlayed his interest in acting into a movie role as “The Village Idiot” in the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” film by the Coen brothers. He continues to perform, record and act, and he continues to seek out the things that speak to him in a way that others might not hear.

Like those shoe strings, or that old tree, or the things others discard and leave behind. What is their history, he wonders? What stories do those silent trinkets have to tell?

“There are a bunch of different ways you could write that and express what’s happening in the soul of that,” he said. “As you get more accomplished, you try to stay focused on what it is and try to find out what it is in yourself. That’s what seems to be important, just trying to keep it real, wherever you are. It’s a big old world now, but I feel more focused on who I am and what I do, and this is it. I feel very rooted in knowing that this is what I do and what I try to accomplish.” - Steve Wildsmith

"...like the songs were spiked with moonshine”. - Tony Sheridan

“Ed is carving himself a niche for his own genre of Appalachian music and prose.” - Jerry Douglas

“Ed trusts his words and his muse more than any other songwriter I know, setting a high bar for the rest of us and bringing a welcome freshness to a well-worn art form.” - Kelly Kessler