Todd Snider collected talented people. Throughout his life, he found himself in the orbit of groundbreaking songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joe Shaver, and Jerry Jeff Walker, who was instrumental in helping Snider launch his career.
Snider, who died Nov. 14 at 59, often did likewise with younger artists, most notably with Sierra Ferrell, the Grammy-winning songwriter whom he first encountered outside of a venue in West Virginia in 2014, with, Snider wrote, a “group of rail kids.”
During a special Snider tribute episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Elizabeth Cook and Chuck Mead recount the tale of how Snider met and encouraged Ferrell. “A lot of people don’t know that,” Cook says.
“He told me that she was out behind Mountain Stage in Charleston, West Virginia, maybe busking or jamming in that parking lot area,” she continues. “Todd likes to hang out with anybody on the street, so I guess he heard her and somehow she came to Nashville and went to [producer] Eric McConnell’s house and they recorded.”
“He was incredibly encouraging to her,” Mead says of Snider’s mentorship. “Like, ‘You gotta come here.’”
“‘You need to do this,’” Cook says Snider told Ferrell.
Snider was so enamored of Ferrell’s talent that he wrote a letter to Magnet Magazine trumpeting his discovery. “They had a young woman about 20 some years old traveling with them. Somebody told her to sing and when she did I was so stunned by the song and the sound of it that I called my wife and asked if I could bring her home,” he wrote in 2014. “She is here now and so is her dog.” That same year, they performed a version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” together onstage in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
More than a decade later, Snider was still singing Ferrell’s praises. He devoted a recent email to a Rolling Stone editor to Ferrell’s story, and pointed out that a photo from a 2014 RS photo essay about East Nashville included Ferrell. Snider was “kinda proud” of helping her music journey, he wrote.
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Watch Nashville Now’s complete tribute to Snider, including Cook, Mead, and another artist Snider mentored, Aaron Lee Tasjan, below.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Clever.