SAN MARCOS MUSIC SCENE
The songwriting icon, Americana star and Cheatham Street regular was a Finlay family favorite
Editor’s Note: Through the 1980s and 1990s, Kent Finlay and Diana Finlay Hendricks kept a revolving door of aspiring songwriters at their home in Martindale on the San Marcos River - singing for their supper at Cheatham Street Warehouse. Some stayed a night, some stayed a year and a few never really left. They became family. While it’s not proper to admit to favorites among family, it’s safe to say that among those troubadours, Todd Snider was - and always will be - the Finlay family favorite.
Todd belonged in the tradition of writers such as John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Jimmy Buffett - songwriters whose songs carried more weight in a listening room than they ever did on the radio. Over four decades he grew into a national treasure, building a loyal following that sometimes traveled with him from town to town, creating a rolling community that felt as much like a reunion as a concert. Parking lots became gathering places, full of tie-dye shirts, coolers, bootleg tapes, and the easy understanding that everybody there belonged to the same tribe.
Last November, at 59, Todd died unexpectedly from complications of pneumonia, just as he had released a new album and started another national tour. The news stunned fans, fellow songwriters, and critics who had long considered him one of the defining voices of the Americana movement.
Long before Todd Snider became one of the defining voices of Americana music, he was a kid with a guitar sleeping on our sofa, writing songs at our old house in Martindale on the San Marcos River. He wrote most of his first forty or fifty songs there, on the back porch or in the music room - the seeds of a catalog that would keep growing for the rest of his life.
Kent was his mentor and teacher, and Todd was Kent’s shining star.
He soaked up everything, played every night he could, and never stopped learning about songs, writers, and records.
To our children, Jenni, Sterling and HalleyAnna, he wasn’t just another musician hanging around Cheatham Street and sleeping on the sofa. Todd was a big brother and a hero - the funny one who could make you laugh all afternoon, then pick up a guitar and sing something that would break your heart.
I shared our record collection with him, and you can hear that music in his song “Vinyl Records,” where he runs through some of the artists he studied - Dylan, Emmylou, Bobby Bare, Ramblin’ Jack, Billy Joe Shaver, Willie, Bobbie Gentry, Loretta Lynn, John Prine, Woody Guthrie, Gram Parsons the same albums that once lay in stacks on our floor. He added to that education at Sundance Records on the Square in San Marcos, where Bobby Barnard and Greg Ellis made sure every singer-songwriter record they considered required listening ended up in his hands.
In time he moved on first to Memphis, then to Nashville - and new chapters brought new mentors: Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker. Kent and I eventually divorced, but we remained a family, the kind that holds together out of shared history, shared children, and the simple fact that some bonds don’t disappear just because the marriage does. Todd stayed a part of that family – we stayed connected across the years, through shows and records, road trips and long conversations, successes and screw-ups, all the way up to his untimely death last fall.
In a life built around songs and stages, it isn’t surprising when the next generation ends up on the same road. Sterling grew up to play bass on recording sessions and in Todd’s touring band, standing beside him on stages from coast to coast. They traveled from Florida to Alaska, playing music and making the kind of memories you carry the rest of your life.
Last spring, the day the band finished recording what would become Todd’s final album, High, Lonesome, and Then Some (Aimless Records, 2025), he wrote - in all lowercase, as was his habit: “sterling played amazing. i honestly think we came up with something unique, and his bass parts are the foundation…he never ‘stays home.’ he wrote a couple of hooks and is the stand-out performance… he is going to get a lot of attention for this.”
HalleyAnna opened shows for Todd on several tours, both solo and with his band. After one of those runs, he wrote: “it’s been a joy to watch halleyanna grow into one of the most formidable songwriters of our time. she’s like hayes carll, but pretty.”
Todd loved sharing artists he believed in - not just HalleyAnna and Sterling, but Hayes Carll, Jack Ingram, Elizabeth Cook, Tommy Prine, Jamie Lin Wilson, Aaron Lee Tasjan - proof that the songs, the friendships, and the miles between those early days and everywhere else meant something deeper.
The national music press wrote about him as one of the defining voices of the Americana genre.
Rolling Stone said he helped shape the altcountry movement. Critics called him a master storyteller, a satirist, a troubadour, the unofficial ringmaster of East Nashville.
The stages got bigger, the crowds louder, the miles longer, but when Todd came home, he could walk in the door like he had never left. That’s the part the obituaries can’t really tell. The world knew Todd Snider as one of the great songwriters of his time. We knew him as family.
As close as we all were, each of us saw a different side of him. Kent saw the promise from the beginning. Sterling saw the hero he would grow up to play alongside, sharing a grin across the stage and living the dream. Halley-Anna saw the consummate songwriter who could make a room laugh, cry, or sing along and who believed in her and her music and wanted to take her on the road and share her with his fans. Jenni saw a story that needed to be told and talked her partner Brian T. Atkinson into writing it. That book became East Nashville Skyline (Texas A&M University Press, 2025), more than six years in the making, and released, in a twist none of us could have imagined, just one week after Todd’s death.
And I saw a kid brother. A good friend. Someone to share fears and hopes, good plans and bad ideas, half-finished stories, song titles that might never amount to anything, and the kind of conversations that only happen when nobody else is listening. Todd and I even wrote a couple of songs together. One, “Songwriter’s Prayer,” felt less like something we wrote than something we were given.
When Todd died, the tributes came from everywhere - Nashville, Austin, New York, Los Angeles magazines, radio shows, old bandmates, young songwriters, and fans who felt like they knew him because his songs had been part of their lives for so long. The 2026 GRAMMY Awards included him in the “In Memoriam” segment. All of that was right.
But when I heard the news, I didn’t think about the headlines. I thought about our house on the San Marcos River. I could see him with a guitar in his lap, a half-finished song on a legal pad on the table, Kent leaning back in his chair listening, kids running through the screen door, nobody knowing yet how far those songs would travel.
Todd and I emailed almost every day for years. I pieced together some of those emails from the road for the liner notes to Live: Return of the Songwriter (Aimless Records, 2022), and we laughed when Rolling Stone critic Robert Christgau mentioned the “17 pages of impressionistic liner notes” written by Snider and his “faithful correspondent Diana Finlay Hendricks.”
Yes. We were faithful correspondents. He wrote about things he found walking around a new town before soundcheck, about meeting the people waiting in line for the show, about whatever crossed his mind that morning. Sometimes those emails became songs, or stories he would tell from the stage.
That’s the Todd I remember. Not the one in the magazines, not the one on the posters, not even the one on the records. The one who fed the ducks at his lake house in East Nashville, covered his walls with index cards full of song lines, wrote what we called “proof-of-life” emails before the world woke up, and never ever stopped dreaming out loud.
The music world lost a great songwriter last November. But we lost something more personal - someone woven into the story of our family.
