Photo: Stacie Huckeba

In 2013, Todd Snider was at the height of his creative powers. His latest studio album, Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables, had appeared on multiple Best of 2012 lists. His solo acoustic performances, which drew on a deep catalog of original music going back to his 1994 debut, carried an emotional resonance that connected with audiences via his songcraft and storytelling.

Snider’s gift for conveying veracity via narrative embellishment and a dry wit had long been recognized by such mentors and collaborators as Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark and Kris Kristofferson. In 2013, he directed this imaginative flair into a new medium, as he delivered the manuscript for I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales, which Da Capo Press would release to significant acclaim. As his editor Ben Schafer notes, “What was most striking about working with Todd, from a publishers point of view, is that the manuscript (co-written with the late, great Peter Cooper) arrived in perfect condition four months before deadline via an email accompanied by a three-word note: ‘That was easy.’ I’ve been in publishing for 31 years now and that is still the one and only time a book arrived four months before deadline. It’s also the only time I’ve heard an author describe writing a book as easy.”

The artist’s curiosity and commitment led him into new musical environs that same year. He entered Bob Weir’s TRI Studios with producer/bassist Dave Schools, guitarist Neal Casal, drummer Duane Trucks and keyboard player Chad Staehly to record the eponymous debut of Hard Working Americans. Lap-steel guitarist Jesse Aycock joined the collective before their initial performance in December 2013, which was recorded for the documentary film The First Waltz. A follow-up album, 2016’s Rest in Chaos, focused on Snider’s original material rather than the cover songs he honored via radical reinterpretation on Hard Working Americans. The group remained active through 2018, even recording a yet-to-be-released album with Daniel Sproul, who replaced Neal Casal after he left the group to focus on the Chris Robinson Brotherhood.

Snider passed away this past November due to pneumonia at age 59, ending any lingering hope that HWA might yet reform. The following oral history looks back on the personal impact and legacy of the group. In addition to bandmates Schools and Staehly, friends and musical cohorts Will Kimbrough, Elizabeth Cook and Aaron Lee Tasjan also share their memories of the artist who Bruce Hampton referred to as “The Last Troubadour.”

Dave Schools: Let me say at the outset, if there’s anyone who might’ve been Mark Twain in a previous life, then it was Todd Snider. To me, Todd was the Mark Twain of singer-songwriting.

Something not everyone might realize was that Todd loved jambands. He especially loved Widespread. He had a band with Will Kimbrough called The Nervous Wrecks. They opened for us in the mid-90s and he played with us a time or two.

I didn’t see him again for a while after that. I think it wasn’t until 2009 when we did a tour with the Allman Brothers for their 40th anniversary that I saw him again. He showed up in the dressing room after the show and I was like, “Wow, I haven’t seen you in a long time. What’s going on?”

Chad Staehly: There was a music festival up in Michigan called Dunegrass, and in 2008 Todd was on the bill along with Leftover Salmon and Great American Taxi. AfterTodd set, Vince [Herman] and I cornered Todd. We were like, “Dude, we’re so in love with your last album. We want to hang out. Do you want to hang out?” The next thing you know, we’re in the back of this school bus on the festival grounds for four hours trading songs, laughing, passing joints around, just having the all-time best time ever.

Then about six months later, Great American Taxi and Todd Snider were both playing in Durango on the same night—we were at one theater and Todd was across town at another theater. We touched base with his tour manager and found out that Todd’s show was going to get done much earlier than us. So we invited him to come over at set break. He showed up and we were like, “Awesome man, you came by. Let’s play some songs together.” He asked, “What are we going to play? We’re like, “Oh, we know a bunch of your stuff. Let’s just play your songs.” He looked at us kind of like, “What are you guys talking about?” But we rolled out on stage and played for like 80, 90 minutes. It was a couple covers, but mostly it was his songs. He was blown away, and then that was it. It was on after that.

On top of us playing together and backing him up, he also produced an album of ours. He was also in flux with his day-to-day manager. He had had a longtime manager, Burt Stein, but wasn’t happy with the guy who was handling his day-to-day stuff. This was about the time Taxi was maybe going to wrap it up because Vince was getting back to Leftover Salmon full-time, and I jumped into the management game. One of the first people I approached was Todd and I started working with him in 2011.

Hard Working Americans began when Todd was going to play this theater in Napa. We knew Dave Schools lived close by and we kind of just hatched the idea of saying, “Hey, let’s call Dave and see if he’d want to come play bass with you.” That led to Dave saying, “I’ve got this great drummer, Paulo.”

So they did a trio thing and Dave and Todd just had an absolute ball, and they started talking about making a record right then and there at that show. The show was in December 2012 and, by May of 2013, we were at TRI thinking we were going to do an experimental project with Todd, putting together an all-star jam-leaning band and then seeing what happens. That’s when Todd had this idea: “There are all these great songs that my friends around East Nashville have written and I’d love to cast a bigger light on them.”

Will Kimbrough: Todd reached out to me and said, “We’re probably going to record ‘Another Train,’ and ‘I Don’t Have A Gun [both Kimbrough originals]. Then he mentioned some other songs that they were thinking about recording, by Kevin Gordon and Guy Clark, and he said, “I feel like paying tribute. I want it to be a real band, and I feel like if we’re going to do original songs, then I’m going to write all of them."

I think he was concerned that he would write all the songs and it would just be another record of his own with other musicians, whereas the way they did it, there could be an equal influence of all the members.

Elizabeth Cook: Todd was very proprietary over his songwriting. That was his lane that he had carved out for himself. I think by being in a supergroup with all these other musicians and stretching into the jam world, he was looking at this as an opportunity to stretch and grow. It was also an opportunity to step outside of his writing and cut his favorite songs from some of his favorite songwriters and people that he was just fans of, like Kevin Gordon, Hayes Carll and even myself. He covered “Blackland Farmer,” which I cut on Welder, although I didn’t write it.

I thought his idea was brilliant because there are so many songwriters in our community that have great songs. Here was an opportunity for the jam world to stretch into songwriter lane, which I know Schools was really excited about. Everybody who was there was excited about what everybody else was bringing.

Aaron Lee Tasjan: He said to me around that time, “Man, with this last record, I really feel like I’ve taken the poetry thing in songwriting, the lyrics thing, as far as I can take it for right now, and I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next.” I didn’t really think much of it other than, “Well, you certainly have taken it far and done a great job with that. These lyrics are amazing.”

But when I think back about it now, it sort of makes sense to me. I think Agnostic Hymns was Todd’s 12th record. So I could see where maybe doing a record of other people’s songs might be really appealing to him at that moment where he felt maybe he had taken his lyrics to a certain level where he wasn’t sure how to move forward. Then, all of a sudden, here’s this opportunity to go into a studio and make music with some great people. That probably felt really freeing to him.

There was an amazing opportunity to do that with Dave and the fellas. I think he loved doing it because Todd was such a big supporter of so many of us. When Hayes Carll started doing well, Todd loved that, and I know he loved recording “Stomp and Holler” for the Hard Working Americans record.

Todd was one of those guys who had these funny ways of showing you that he loved you and supported you. Sometimes it would come in a book-long email that came into your inbox at 5:43 AM. Other times it would be, “Hey, man, I love your song, so I recorded it for an album.”

That album reads as a love letter from Todd to people like Kevn Kinney. When they first met, Todd was just playing locally at the Daily Planet and Drivin N Cryin was recording in Memphis. Kevin’s the kind of guy who, if he meets someone and they seem cool and they’re like, “Hey, I’m playing later on, come down and check it out,” then he would do it.

Then everybody was coming down to the Todd Snider gig all of a sudden because Kevn Kinney, the rock star for Drivin N Cryin, was there. So I think Todd being able to sing “Straight to Hell” on the Hard Working Americans album was another way of him being like, “Kevn, you’ve always had my back, and I want you to know that I have yours too. Here’s my version of one of your most famous songs.” Todd’s version of it is just staggering. The vocal take is unbelievably great. It’s hard not to listen to it without choking up a little bit, honestly.

Staehly: The whole First Waltz thing was this harebrained idea of recording the first concert ever that we played and turning that into a movie and a live album. George Boedecker—the founder of Croc shoes, who had started Melvin Records, which put out the HWA albums—came up with it. We all thought he was absolutely off his rocker but in the end, it turned out to be a brilliant idea.

I feel like he kind of captured where everybody’s heads were at when we were forming the band, making our first record and were going to go play our first concert. It gave people a little glimpse into what that was. It turned out to be a unique, cool idea to show the world what that looked like. It ended up on cable services all over the country.

Schools: The movie showed how a lot of the inspiration, and the permission, to deconstruct the songs came about by giving Todd a guitar and cutting him loose in the studio. When we were trying to hone in on a feel for one of these songs, Todd would start dancing and Duane would adjust the groove he was playing because we wanted it all to come from him. So if he played a cracked version, like a Peace Queer version of the Chuck Mead song [“Run a Mile”] then we built it up from him. It all emanated from him.

When I’m producing a record, I’m going to go for the real human thing, even if it’s not necessarily perfect. He recorded “Wrecking Ball” as a duet with Neal, and Todd was literally crying at the end.

Staehly: It was all this lightning strike stuff. For that first record we all got together at TRI. Dave never met Neal Casal in person until that day. Dave was the only one that knew Duane. Dave was searching for a drummer for the session, knowing we wanted a jam guy, so he asked Jimmy Herring, “Have you got any ideas?” Jimmy was like, “I think my son-in-law Duane is probably ready for the gig.” Duane had been cutting his teeth with Colonel Bruce, who all of us had interacted with in some way.

When we made the record, it was initially a project for Todd, but as soon as we finished that session, it was like, “Well, we’re a band and now we’ve got to go play.”

Kimbrough: Todd told me, “I really like stepping up there and just singing, then letting them jam and I’m up there in it.” I think he was enjoying something new and something where he didn’t have to carry the show—not that carrying the show was necessarily a burden to him. It was just that for once, Todd allowed other people to be in control of a large chunk of the show. With an eight-minute version of “Another Train,” only four minutes of it are singing.

Todd was not necessarily a jammer musically. He was a wonderful musician, but I think he felt like the jam was the territory of the other guys. He told me how much he loved losing himself in the music, and he knew it wouldn’t last forever but he was having a blast.

Schools: He wanted to be a frontman. He loved Chris Robinson and Mick Jagger, but he didn’t necessarily want to dance around. I mean, he had some great moves, but once we started digging in and Neal was going and we were pushing each other and it was an improv section, Todd would migrate over to the back corner of the stage or even offstage to the side by Jesse. He’d be visible to the audience, but not part of what was happening musically because I think he wanted to listen and he wanted everyone to focus on what was happening.

When we got to what the Allman Brothers called “hitting the note” or Panic calls “reeling in the big fish,” I would see Todd put his hands together over his head and hold him straight up in the air. It was like he had just won an Oscar or something, it pleased him so much.

It was like he became an audience member, and we’d almost have to be like, “Yo, you’ve got to finish the song. You can’t just hang out over there and enjoy the show. You got to come over here and tie up the song. You got two more choruses!”

Cook: I remember that Todd was interested in utilizing the Hard Working Americans band to develop his singing because he didn’t have to play guitar, he didn’t have to tell stories, he didn’t have to carry the show. So that’s one thing that he did in that band. Todd was so passionate with his music and creativity. He was always looking to reinvent and he was a master of doing that over and over again.

Schools: Todd had the idea of, “Hey, we could put one of Neal’s songs in here.” So we kind of worked up “Superhighway.” We never played the song, but we did work it up and sort of jam on it. Then someone else suggested, “What about ‘Train Song?’” I was right in there with “Guaranteed” and Todd was all about it because those were songs he had already released in the form that he wanted.

So we were able to utilize the lens we had used at TRI for the first record, which was absolute deconstruction and rebuilding. Very few, if any of those songs on the first record sound anything like the original versions by the original artist.

With “Train Song,” Todd put it in our hands, and we turned it into a Stones thing. We turned “Guaranteed” into a noise opera, and it’s there in the film.

I remember after the second or third show we did, Neal came up to me and said, “This band’s got gears I didn’t expect us to have.”

Staehly: I think the last date was in Chicago. I had a buddy there who had a studio. Lightning was striking and everybody was hot for this whole thing, so we were like, “Let’s go in and record.”

Schools: We booked four days in a studio, and that’s when the Rest in Chaos stuff started to come out. Todd was writing poetry. He was in the vocal booth laying down ideas. We were coming up with riffs and jams. We knew right then that it was the right time.

Staehly: Throughout the day on the bus, Todd was constantly listening to all the conversations going on around him and some of that ended up in the songs on Rest in Chaos. For instance, prior to Hard Working Americans, he had never heard the term “riding the rail.” He caught that and immediately asked about it. Sure enough, riding the rail was in a lyric.

He joked with us, “Hey, you guys mostly wrote these lyrics. This is just stuff I was grabbing from you as we were talking on the tour.” So he was constantly tuned in and constantly in that mindset of, “Is there a lyric happening right now?”

Sometimes you’d go to his house and, on a wall, there would be sticky notes and other pieces of paper or a board where he was writing stuff. He would collect lines and try to assemble those together. He was constantly processing, thinking in terms of songwriting and lyrics and how he could grab this stuff to really explain or portray the human condition.

Kimbrough: Todd was a natural songwriter, and I think that telling the truth through hyperbole came naturally to him, although he developed it. I think you could be at a writing workshop and show people, “Here’s John Prine’s ‘Bruised Orange.’ Here are these songs by Todd Snider." I think you’re born with that and you either work on it or you don’t. He worked really hard on it but he could be really hard on himself.

Schools: At one point Todd asked me what I thought about using words from one song in another song because he’d left after the third day and, on the last day there, Neal and Jesse sang a part on the song “Something Else” that was a slightly different version of a line that Todd had intended for “Roman Candles.” I started thinking about Frank Zappa and the concept of conceptual continuity where these things can sort of pop up. Then I started thinking about albums like Quadrophenia and S.F. Sorrow, sort of rock operas, because Todd was going through some heavy shit—getting divorced—and this country was going through some heavy shit. Also, everybody in there was on their spectrum of having been done with drugs or in the middle of doing drugs or staying away from certain drugs by doing something else. It was divorce, democracy, drugs and death. So I told Todd that was fine.

After Chicago, we went to Nashville and recorded some songs he had written: “Dope is Dope,” “Roman Candles” and “Opening Statement.” The song “Purple Mountain Jamboree” we wrote as a team in there at Masterfonics.

But even when we were finishing out the record, Todd was slaving away writing and changing lyrics. The whole album became this thing about what happens to people. What happens to factions? What’s up with the United States? It wound up becoming this dark monolith. It’s heavy.

The song “It Runs Together” is about Melita [Snider’s ex-wife] who he met in rehab. There was a woman there who was obsessed with Phil Hartman. Todd and Melita left early, and they got thrown off an airplane because they were drunk. They went to a hotel room, turned on the TV and the woman who was obsessed with Phil Hartman turned out to be his wife, and she shot and killed him and then herself. That is a true fucking story.

If you listen to the words of “Massacre,” it’s talking about how the rumor mill just churns out another couple every day. That’s Nashville gossip, talking about Todd and Elizabeth, who were both going through high profile divorces.

Cook: I loved the opportunity to hear him wrapped up that way with the most sophisticated musical accompaniment that he ever had in his recording career, save maybe some of the early days when he was a major label kid, which I was too at one point. You have those bands in those studios until you reject that system. So since that era and after the solo records, to hear Todd with his songs presented that way was really beautiful. It’s a heavy record.

Staehly: If I were to think about the songs from Rest in Chaos that were quintessential Todd from that era, two come to mind. When it comes to turn of phrase—how he could take a common phrase and turn it inside out—there’s a bunch of that in “Opening Statement.” Then, for me, “Burn Out Shoes” was quintessential Hard Working Americans’ kick in the teeth rock-and-roll with this psychedelic sheen that the band was capable of.

Tasjan: I basically missed out on his time with the Nervous Wrecks. By the time I was seeing Todd live consistently, he was mostly playing solo. When he did play with a band it was mostly a trio. But I do remember very distinctively this Hard Working Americans show that I went to in North Carolina. It was a super packed club and standing out in the audience watching him, I was like, “Man, this guy is a rock star.”

I’d grown up knowing him as a folk singer troubadour person, but everything he did as a folk singer that drew me in—his sense of humor, his sincerity, his big heart, the love and respect he had for the traditions of the music that he was performing—that all came across in Hard Working Americans, just under the umbrella of a different genre.

He just found different ways to inhabit all of the characteristics of his artistry that drew his fans in. He was still authentically all of those things, just in a different way as the front person of Hard Working Americans. It was electrifying to behold. He definitely changed the molecules in the room.

To be continued in Part Two