Todd Snider, whose album ‘East Nashville Skyline’ is essential to roots music, is dead at 59

Nashville musician Todd Snider, a singer-songwriter known for his blend of humor and story, died on Friday. He was 59 years old.

News of Snider’s death was confirmed by his official social media accounts on Saturday. Local fans soon started gathering outside of the Purple Building in East Nashville — where Snider made music and filmed a documentary — to pay their respects, leaving flowers and wearing t-shirts bearing the musician’s name.

“He relayed so much tenderness and sensitivity through his songs, and showed many of us how to look at the world through a different lens,” Snider’s Instagram account wrote in a tribute.

“He got up every morning and started writing, always working towards finding his place among the songwriting giants that sat on his record shelves, those same giants who let him into their lives and took him under their wings, who he studied relentlessly. Guy Clark, John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker.”

His death comes after he was the victim of an alleged assault in Utah that forced the cancelation of his tour. An update yesterday from Snider’s social media said that he had been hospitalized after contracting walking pneumonia.

Snider carved a space out for himself as a mischievous folk wit, an influential figure in a then-coalescing Americana scene and an emblem of the bohemian early 2000s East Nashville artist community.

WPLN’s Jewly Hight wrote this about him in a 2012 profile:

Snider is the rare folksinger who possesses a gift for getting people to laugh even when they disagree with his views. His skewed, frequently surprising punch lines make his confrontational ideas go down easier…

“For me, music has always been Saturday night,” Snider explains. “And for me, Saturday night has always been drinking and joking around. …The last thing that you want to do, or that you want someone to do to you, in my opinion, is be preached at or lobbied or educated or any of that. …I feel like I just try not to take the Saturday night out of it. Because then you might as well go into speech-writing or that type of thing, for my money.”