Extended Biography of Ed Snodderly
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"Ed Snodderly: Maker of 'New Hillbilly Music'"

by Ted Olson

One of the select group of American "roots" musicians to appear in the Coen brothers' movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which was among other things a paean to Southern music), Ed Snodderly likes music with particularly deep roots. Some of the most respected musicians in contemporary music, as well as several music critics who survey the American music scene, agree that Snodderly's musical vision--expressed through songwriting and through persuasive performances of his own and of traditional songs--is distinctively Appalachian. Dobroist Jerry Douglas, characterizing Snodderly as being like a painter of regional landscapes, has asserted that "Snodderly's imagery comes through the words he uses to describe the world his songs live in. And his time period is not the one we exist in. He writes as though he lived ages ago, in a simpler time set with straight-ahead values. He also possesses the tools to perform the songs in a very convincing manner. He's carving himself a niche for his own genre of Appalachian music." Music journalist Allana Nash has acknowledged that "Snodderly's songs are evocative and original," while writer Robert K. Oermann has commented, "I know of no other songwriter that writes with such a strong sense of place."

Snodderly's performances are equally worthy of praise. Some people already know that, especially fans of his former group The Brother Boys, which toured widely and recorded three acclaimed albums in the 1990s, including two for the prestigious Sugar Hill label.

Snodderly has made what he has sometimes described as "new hillbilly music" virtually all his life Raised in the rich musical environment of northeast Tennessee, he learned to play several stringed instruments by watching his fiddler grandfather, guitarist father, and a pedal-steel-playing uncle. While appreciating the folk, country, and bluegrass he heard within his family circle during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Snodderly was simultaneously absorbing many other musical influences he heard on the radio, including rock 'n' roll, soul, pop, and, perhaps most crucially, the singer-songwriter scene that followed in the wake of the urban folk revival.

Snodderly soon began to write his own songs and to make his own music, eventually incorporating the aforementioned musical influences into his own blending of old and new sounds. This blend, which he has termed "new hillbilly music," grew out of Snodderly's respect for his cultural background as well as his keen awareness of the changes taking place in Appalachia: "Years ago," he says, "people would ask me, 'What kind of music do you play?' I came up with the label 'new hillbilly' to confuse them while still giving an answer, and also to describe the kinds of songs I write. You see, I write songs that describe the world I come from and my everyday experiences. The songs I write are 'new' because they're present and immediate; the 'hillbilly' part of that label reflects where I'm from. For many years people have called folks from this area 'hillbillies.' A lot of folks don't like that term, and I myself don't like the term's negative connotations; but I also know that the real 'hillbillies' were and still are very smart and compassionate people who live close to the land."

As an ambitious young musician who longed to see the world beyond the mountains, Snodderly in 1973 moved to Boston. Joining a country-rock band there, he honed his songwriting and performing skills, eventually attracting the attention of Philo Records, an independent New England-based label that specialized in promoting emergent singer-songwriters. In 1977 Philo released Snodderly's debut album Sidewalk Shoes . Tellingly, rather than remain in Boston to capitalize on that development, Snodderly moved back to northeast Tennessee--in part to operate the now legendary Johnson City-based music club he co-founded in 1976 (the Down Home, which recently marked a quarter century of continuous operation) and in part to hone his musical craft in his beloved native region. After a couple of years, he traveled to California to record a new batch of country- and bluegrass-influenced original songs with musicians like Byron Berline and Jay Dee Maness. However, Snodderly decided to forgo joining the burgeoning "roots" music scene out west. Rather than try to locate a sympathetic nationally distributed label for his all-star California sessions, he returned to his Tennessee mountain home and released those recordings as Sweet Light (1980) on a tiny independent label, Cloudland Records, owned by folk revivalist musician Doug Dorschug. As a result of these decisions, Snodderly for the next decade remained a compelling but not widely heard musical voice.

Throughout the 1980s Snodderly continued to make music locally and also acted and performed with a Johnson City-based theater group, The Road Company. Toward the end of that decade, he and fellow actor and musician Eugene Wolf, while producing a play they had jointly written entitled Echoes and Postcards , recognized their shared enthusiasm for older country music. Before long, they formed The Brother Boys. Including at times other musicians like Missy Raines, Roger Rasnake, Gary Smith, and Roland White, The Brother Boys was at its heart a duo combining Snodderly's original songs, instrumental virtuosity, and lead vocals with Wolf's lead and harmony vocals. The chemistry was magical, producing music that, according to Acoustic Guitar magazine, took "an old-timey view of the modern world and a modern gander at the old-timey one." Releasing three acclaimed albums--their self-titled debut (New Hillbilly/Zu-zazz Records, 1989), Plow (Sugar Hill Records, 1993), and Presley's Grocery (Sugar Hill, 1996)--The Brother Boys garnered national, even international attention. The group was featured in People Magazine, the reviewer remarking that Snodderly and Wolf sounded "like hillbillies whose moonshine got spiked with acid," while the first Brother Boys album was reissued on CD in Germany. In 1992 The Brother Boys appeared as guest vocalists on Jerry Douglas' Grammy-nominated album Slide Rule , singing Snodderly's song "Pearlie Mae." The Brother Boys'/Douglas' recording of "Pearlie Mae" became a bluegrass hit, remaining for a year in the top five on the bluegrass music survey chart; in 2000 Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine ranked that version of "Pearlie Mae" (Snodderly had originally recorded the song for his first solo album) as being among the most popular bluegrass hits recorded during the 1990s (#64 on that magazine's 1990s-spanning Top 200 list).

In 1998, The Brother Boys disbanded, with Wolf pursuing acting full-time, and Snodderly performing as a solo musician and in various collaborations, first with singer-songwriter Malcomb Holcombe and more recently with The Reeltime Travelers, a Johnson City-based string band collective whose musicians (fiddler Heidi Andrade, banjo-picker Roy Andrade, bassist Brandon Story, guitarist Martha Scanlan, and mandolin-player Thomas Sneed) share Snodderly's love for traditional Appalachian music. Snodderly also taught dobro, guitar, and songwriting lessons for East Tennessee State University's acclaimed Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music program.

Still interested in acting, Snodderly in 1999 won a small role in O Brother, Where Art Thou? . Playing a "village idiot," he portrayed the visual image of a particular type of Southern musician--an unrestrained "hillbilly" fiddler. For a few seconds in the village scene toward the end of the movie, Snodderly arrested the movie-goer's attention as he brilliantly embodied the hillbilly stereotype, fiddling Mississippi crazy. Ironically, his acting in O Brother, Where Art Thou? conveyed the same sort of mass-media representation of Southern rural culture that has offended him all his life--that he has for many years tried to revise through making "new hillbilly music."

As if out of some kind of penance, Snodderly is back on the road these days, publicly showcasing his large backlog of original songs, including such fan favorites as "Band Box," "Diamond Stream," "Satellite Shack," and "Farther Than Your Eyes Can See." Snodderly's subtly accented lead singing entertains audiences while at the same time communicates a clear vision of real--as opposed to stereotyped--Appalachian culture.

These days, more and more people are finding out about Snodderly, and in particular they are recognizing the lasting quality of his songwriting. Not long ago, the acoustic duo Missy Raines and Jim Hurst recorded a Snodderly song, "Small Southern Town," while mandolinist/singer Sam Bush cut Snodderly's song "Majestic." Additionally, Michigan's Olivet College chose a choral arrangement of his song "What Will Be in the Fields Tomorrow" as the musical theme for that school's "Founders Day" ceremony. To satisfy his growing fan-base, Snodderly recently released on Majestic Records (his own independent record label) a career retrospective CD entitled The Diamond Stream featuring new performances of his best songs from the past (with fellow O Brother alumnus Norman Blake accompanying him on two tracks). The album generated a positive review in the prestigious British music magazine Mojo and received some airplay around the world (for example, in Japan). Snodderly will soon release another album on Majestic Records on which he gathers recordings--made at engineer Keith Smith's Johnson City-based EKS Sound studio and showcasing both solo performances and performances with various collaborators--of previously unissued original songs.

Perhaps most indicative of the growing admiration for Snodderly's music is the fact that, in the Spring of 2001, Nashville's Country Music Foundation--to commemorate permanently its mission of celebrating America's musical heritage--engraved in the wall of its new Hall of Honor the following lines from Snodderly's song "Diamond Stream":

"So take down your box and play the string,
Whisper up your own travelling tune,
Listen to the sound that the water makes,
The diamond stream, the diamond stream."

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About the Author:

Ted Olson teaches Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University.  He is also the author and editor of several books about Appalachian culture.
E-mail address: olson@etsu.edu