Josh Crutchmer
View all posts by Josh Crutchmer March 21, 2026
Jack Ingram and Aaron Lee Tasjan were among the artists singing in tribute to late songwriter Todd Snider at an all-star show in Texas. Gary Miller/Getty Images One day after serenading fans alongside Willie Nelson and the Family band at Luck Reunion, Lukas Nelson stepped back onto the festival’s main stage on Friday with a message for a new set of fans that had gathered: “Todd Snider rules!”
Lukas shouted the phrase after covering “Old Timer” late in the day at the Todd Snider Rules! concert at Nelson’s Texas ranch — a daylong gathering to honor to the late troubadour and part of a seemingly endless run of tribute shows that have taken place in Americana circles since Snider’s sudden death in November.
Nelson was one of more than 20 Texas and Americana artists to show up for a festival that culminated in a two-hour tribute set by guest vocalists backed by a six-piece house band.
Tommy Prine, son of Snider’s mentor, John Prine, set the tone with a gut-punch of a speech about Snider’s impact. “I know that my dad meant a whole lot to Todd, and vice versa. And, if I could just have one more thing to tell Todd, I would let him know that the guy that he looked up to so much had a little boy that looked up to him a whole lot,” a visibly emotional Prine declared.
Aaron Lee Tasjan, Snider’s friend and producer, followed Prine by saying, “We sure miss you, buddy, and we love you so much.”
Then, a rotating cast of musicians wrung every laugh and tear they could from the crowd. On tap were a stunning cover of “Conservative, Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight White American Male” by Snider apprentice Emma Ogier, a show-stopping, improvised fiddle solo by Amanda Shires, and a tearful Cody Canada sharing Snider’s friendship and influence.
The set capped 10 hours of stories, speeches, and tributes on Willie Nelson’s Luck ranch in Spicewood, Texas, site of the annual reunion. It marked the largest in a run of tributes to Snider in the Lone Star State, where his influence on the independent songwriter scene was as impactful as it had been in Snider’s longtime East Nashville home.
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The afternoon started on the main stage — dubbed Luck World Headquarters — with Levi Snider leading the early crowd in a singalong of standards written by his uncle Todd. “If all goes as planned, you can expect a 60-minute distraction from our impending doom,” Levi said from the stage. His first song was “Can’t Complain,” and he peppered “Alright Guy,” “D.B. Cooper” and “Conservative, Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight White American Male” over the next hour. Across the grounds, Pedal Steel Noah serenaded a small gathering in the chapel with an instrumental set.
Kevn Kinney, Ashleigh Flynn, Tasjan, and Shires swapped songs for an hour in the Barn, a tent-covered ground adjacent to World Headquarters. Aside from a Tasjan cover of “Just Like Old Times” with Shires singing harmony, the four played originals. Kinney led off with a declaration that, “These are all brand new songs that only Todd has heard.”
Their set was heavy on stories. Shires shared a tale of Snider taking her on her first bus tour in the early 2000s, getting her stoned, and sending her into a Target with a grocery list, which she immediately lost, to Snider’s amusement.
Tasjan forged a close friendship with Snider and produced October’s High, Lonesome, and Then Some, which Snider released shortly before his death. Kinney noted that both he and Snider had an obvious influence on Tasjan and said that he and Todd were going to take Tasjan out and tell him that “he graduated, like ‘It’s time to be yourself, Aaron.’ But, we never did,” Kinney said, “and two years later, we were both fighting over who was going to get Aaron to produce our records.”
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As afternoon turned to evening, Jack Ingram, a Texas music staple who toured heavily with Snider in the late 1990s, introduced a cover of Guy Clark’s “Stuff that Works” by telling the crowd that he and Snider used to sit around listening to Clark’s music on days off. He also played “Picture on My Wall,” which he wrote in a hotel room while on the road with Snider and Will Kimbrough.
“It reminds me of being young and touring with one of my best friends,” Ingram said.
Amanda Shires performs at the “Todd Snider Rules!” tribute concert at Luck Ranch. Photo: Gary Miller/Getty Those remarks came while swapping songs with Levi Snider and Shelby Stone. The former covered John R. Butler’s gospel parody, “The Hand of the Almighty” — which is better known colloquially as “God Will Fuck You Up” and said he thought it was Todd’s favorite gospel tune: “I was never able to make him laugh until I played him that song.” When Levi Snider finished, the 26-year-old Stone noted, “Todd is fucking hilarious in the coolest kind of way, because he’s not trying at all.”
By the time Hayes Carll took the main stage, several dozen similar moments had transpired across the ranch as Texas musicians like Kat Hasty, Briscoe, and John Craigie played alongside Nashville songwriters like Tasjan and Chelsea Lovitt.
Carll’s full-band set was the de facto co-headliner, which drew upon his entire catalog. He opened with a pair of staples, “Drunken Poet’s Dream” and “You Got It All,” before kicking off “The Progress of Man” off last summer’s introspective We’re Only Human LP.
“It’s such a beautiful thing to see all y’all out here, and so many people who knew Todd as a musician and an artist,” Carll said before he yielded the stage to the tribute set. “He’s a singular human being and just a force of nature.”
The finale stretched out over two hours, and by the time Canada, Shires, and Jason Boland, respectively, stepped into the spotlight to cap the night, the love and admiration for Snider had been laid bare. All the artists needed to do was send everyone home with full hearts.
Canada went first, playing two Snider songs and one he wrote to honor the troubadour, all solo. After his voice cracked throughout covers of “Can’t Complain,” and “Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request,” the Cross Canadian Ragweed frontman shared the impact Snider had on him and on Ragweed’s 2025 comeback after a 17-year breakup.
“I’ll say until the day that I croak that I wouldn’t have a career without that guy,” Canada told the fans. “He took care of me when my band broke up. After a few years had passed, and people wanted the band to get back together, I called him and Robert Earl Keen and said, ‘What should I do?’ They said, ‘Whatever you want to do. You’re driving this bus.’ It’s hard for me to let go of that, sometimes. I have two boys. They’re 20 and 18. Todd has known them since before they were born. He said, ‘Your kids deserve to see your victory lap.’
“The afternoon that I got the news,” he continued, “it brought me out of a dry spell.”
Canada then played the song he wrote for Snider that day, “Todd’s Song,” which currently exists only on social media. The last line goes, “You forgot your shoes/Glad I ran into you.”
Shires was next. The Lubbock, Texas, fiddle player, songwriter, and decades-long friend of Snider’s only played one song, but it was a cover of “Too Soon to Tell” that she and the house band stretched out over more than 15 minutes. Silverada frontman Mike Harmeier took the stage with Shires — not to sing but to act as a human teleprompter, lying flat on the stage and holding three printed-out pages of lyrics to the sprawling 2012 song of Snider’s that laments, “It’s too soon to tell what’s goin’ to happen to you when you die.”
Shires brought the song to its high point by trading bluesy, swampy fiddle solos and twin harmony with the backing band’s Noah Jeffries, unrehearsed. One of Snider’s favorite ways to play shows was in front of bands he had never played with before. Shires and Jeffries did their best to capture the spontaneity that can come from those situations. “I did have this idea where we would all suddenly start dancing,” she said when they finished. “But then I thought, ‘That’s weird to do up onstage.’ It’s better at a bar with your bachelorette friends.”
Jeffries, fiddle player with Jason Boland and the Stragglers, remained onstage when Boland stepped to the microphone to close out the evening. Boland played “Proud Souls,” one of the first songs he ever wrote, and said it was directly inspired by Snider.
