{"id":632,"date":"2013-01-26T20:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-01-26T20:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/216.71.127.204\/wordpress\/?p=632"},"modified":"2015-10-13T15:07:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T15:07:15","slug":"ed-snodderly-almost-austin-pasadena-tx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/houstonmusicreview.com\/wordpress\/2013\/01\/26\/ed-snodderly-almost-austin-pasadena-tx\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Snodderly – Almost Austin – Pasadena, TX"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Written by James Killen <\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jan 26, 2013 at 08:00 PM<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"Image\"You don\u2019t see Ed Snodderly\u2019s name on any big casino billboards or headlining a night at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Ed might be best remembered by most people as the fiddle player in \u201cOh Brother Where Art Thou.\u201d What most people don\u2019t know is that the new Nashville Country Music Hall of Fame building has the words from Ed\u2019s song \u201cThe Diamond Stream\u201d engraved in the wall. Ed lives in Eastern Tennessee, just the other side of the mountain from Malcolm Holcombe, another of the Appalachian singer-songwriters familiar to most of the Almost Austin regulars. Malcolm mentioned to Ed what a cool music scene Houston was having, so Ed decided to come on down Saturday night to check it out.<\/p>\n

Ed opened up the show with \u201cBand Box\u201d featuring a smooth jazzy hillbilly guitar style recounting an old fiddle tune, to which Ed had added lyrics. It\u2019s immediately apparent that Ed Snodderly is a story teller as well as a musician and song writer. This is not unusual for the folksy side of music to include a few stories, but Ed takes it to a new level. It\u2019s hard to tell when the story telling stops and the song begins sometimes, as he\u2019ll start to loosely play a few notes during the introductory conversation, then the tune begins to take shape and before you know it you\u2019re well into the first stanza of the song. Ed seems to sing and play his instruments as fluidly and effortlessly as he talks and breathes.<\/p>\n

The second tune was \u201cCryin\u2019 Boy\u201d played on the banjo. The show continued with \u201cFarther Than Your Eyes Can See\u201d about the lives of the people he knows, farmers and such, and features some piercing imagery with lines like \u201cEverything turns to rust and blows away\u201d. The show continued with \u201cMagnolia\u201d and \u201cMajestic\u201d which Ed played on a resonator guitar that he borrowed from Jimmie Hendricks (not Jimi Hendrix). Ed then took us on a virtual trip to the farmer\u2019s market in Johnson City, Tennessee with the \u201cJohnson City Rag\u201d as he recounts sitting on a stool at the market with a banjo and riffing on the passers-by (a pastime that he seems to really enjoy). During the introduction to \u201cDiamond Stream\u201d, Ed talked us through his chords, commenting on people that are learning to play guitar and the personality of the chords as if they were characters in a script, speaking English and music interchangeably like some kind of a language translation exercise.<\/p>\n

After the intermission, the Show started back up with \u201cLittle Egypt\u201d and \u201cBlack Crow\u201d. His third song of the second set tempted me to use the adjective, \u201cDylanesce\u201d as if it were something approaching Bob Dylan\u2019s style, but \u201cA Basket of Singing Birds\u201d is so much Ed Snodderly, that I would rather suspect that he and Dylan were drinking from the same well of inspiration. \u201cTwist You Up\u201d was the musical version of Ed\u2019s grandmother\u2019s advice about leaving the hills of home. Ed turned a rendition of an old 78RPM tune called \u201cParty Song\u201d into a rousing sing along, followed by \u201cSmall Southern Town\u201d and \u201cA Life of My Own\u201d. \u201cA Life of my Own\u201d had a rhythm that reminded one of the old Johnny Cash tunes, which elicited a story about the last time that Ed had seen the man in black. He said that Cash was so weak that they had to push him on to the stage in a wheelchair, but that when he spoke into the mike and said \u201cHi, I\u2019m Johnny Cash\u201d the hairs still stood up on Ed\u2019s neck. Mr. Snodderly ended the evening with an old gospel sing-a-long called \u201cGoodbye\u201d that had the whole room singing in unison.<\/p>\n

I often get to see artists for the first time and enjoy their work. After this first show with Ed Snodderly, I can truly say that it\u2019s been good to meet him. An evening at an Ed Snodderly show is an invitation to spend a while with him in his world, and it ain\u2019t such a bad world at all.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by James Killen Jan 26, 2013 at 08:00 PM You don\u2019t see Ed Snodderly\u2019s name on any big casino billboards or headlining a night at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Ed might be best remembered by most people as the fiddle player in \u201cOh Brother Where Art Thou.\u201d What most people don\u2019t know… <\/p>\n

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