Roanoke native Allen Thompson leads tribute to Todd Snider on Saturday at 5 Points Music Sanctuary

Singer and songwriter Todd Snider’s death would have made an intriguing story — by turns horrifying and hilarious — if only Snider was the one telling it.

Pneumonia and sepsis killed the 59-year-old Snider in Nashville on Nov. 14, 2025. Weeks before, Snider alleged that he had been assaulted, then was turned away from a Salt Lake City hospital where police later arrested him, capping a scuttled tour, according to news accounts at the time.

Anyone who saw Snider play live, including multiple dates in the Roanoke and New River valleys, could imagine him finding the pathos and humor in a story like that. After all, the author of such songs as “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Males,” “Alright Guy,” “The Ballad of the Kingsmen” and “Play A Train Song” had an equal talent for spinning rambling and rapturous spoken-word tales during live performances.

“One hundred percent,” said Allen Thompson, a Roanoke native and one of dozens of Snider acolytes in East Nashville, Tennessee. “I couldn’t imagine the final chapter of Todd’s story in a way that wasn’t just as surreal and chaotic and hilarious and sad and emotional as his life was.”

Thompson — a singer, songwriter and band leader whose time with Snider included a stint in the band East Side Bulldogs (Snider fronted the band under the alias Elmo Buzz) — was still wrapping his mind around it all in March when he heard from Tyler Godsey, executive director at Thompson’s hometown venue, 5 Points Music Sanctuary. 

Godsey wanted Thompson to lead a group of East Nashville performers in a tribute show.

“I sat with it for a while, because it was still a little too early for me to kind of think about,” Thompson said in phone calls last month and on Wednesday. “I didn’t want to just blindly say yes to it. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t saying yes to it because I was grieving and wanted to do something, but I was saying yes to it because it was a good idea.”

After he talked with folks he trusted on the matter, including Snider tour manager and man-of-many-other-missions Brian Kincaid, the scale leaned toward “good idea.” Thompson brought another noted singer/songwriter, Jon Latham, into the mix, and they began plotting a proper tribute.

Like A Force of Nature: A Tribute to Todd Snider is set for Saturday at 5 Points, with Lilly Winwood, Lilly Hiatt, John Latham, Rachel Cole and Thompson, with Roanoke-based The Floorboards as the house band.

Winwood and Hiatt come from good musical stock — Steve Winwood is father to the former, and John Hiatt’s daughter is the latter. But like everyone else among this East Nashville troupe, they each opened shows for Snider in Virginia. 

“We didn’t realize that until we were comparing dates and stuff after the show had been booked and announced, so that was kind of a neat little serendipitous thing,” said Thompson, whose gigs with Snider included a February 2018 opening spot at the Lyric Theater in Blacksburg.

More important was to make a date that didn’t ape Snider’s style, even if the performers were celebrating him by singing his songs.

“I really just kind of wanted to pick folks that have worked with Todd and been mentored by him, but weren’t exactly the same type of folk singer … artists that would be able to kind of do something a little bit different than what you expect with the material,” Thompson said.

The lineup fits into one of Godsey’s philosophies. Godsey saw Snider for the first time in 2012, in the former church building that would become the Sanctuary. He had hoped to book Snider there in recent years, but the timing didn’t work. Thompson, however, has played the venue multiple times with different acts.

Godsey said he admires Thompson’s talent and the authentic connections he’s made with musicians everywhere he’s been.

“There are a lot of people from Roanoke that have started, grew up here, and they’ve gone and expanded on their creative outlets,” Godsey said. “I would talk to Allen every time he came to do a show here, I was like, I know you work with some amazing musicians, but bring some of these people that you played with to Roanoke, show them where your roots are and help them understand why this place is special.” 

“Let’s reinforce the fact that there is something in the air in our region that has nurtured a lot of creative talent that often just people don’t know about. They don’t know how and where we go when we leave here, and it’s really important for me for them to have a place to come back to and to sort of help to tell their story as they come back to their roots and celebrate the path that they’ve walked.”

What to expect

Thompson has planned a two-set show. The first will feature Thompson, Latham, Winwood, Hiatt, Cole and the Floorboards’ frontman, Matt Browning, swapping songs and stories, mostly Snider originals, along with a couple of songs that he covered.

The Floorboards will back the troupe in the second set, for a retrospective of Snider’s electric music.

“I knew they would be perfect for it, because I knew they could handle everything from the wildness of the Bulldogs to the precision playing on Hard Working Americans and all the points in between,” Thompson said.

A devoted follower

Snider had a strong following in the folk and rock music worlds, but the unofficial “Mayor of East Nashville” spent an unusual amount of time following lots of emerging acts’ careers.

He was not only a musician and songwriter but a fan of a wide variety of music, Latham said by phone in October during a drive with Thompson to a Phish show in Huntsville, Alabama.

“When you hear that song that he did called ‘Vinyl Records,’ where he’s just spitting out name after name after name after name of all these records that he had, there was some serious truth to that,” Latham said. “He was always listening, you know.

“Even if you didn’t hear from him for a bit, every time that I’d run into him, he knew exactly what I’ve been up to. He knew exactly the last couple of shows that I played. He was always watching. He was always kind of checking in on us, because he really dug what we did, even if it wasn’t exactly like what he’s doing.”

He also “went out of his way” to bring those friends and neighbors on the road with him, if he liked what they were doing, Thompson said.

“As the pandemic was beginning to wind down, he had told all of us if we ran into him or you’d get that email in your inbox basically saying, ‘As soon as we can get back on the road, I’m taking the whole neighborhood with me,’” he recalled. “And true to his word, that entire ‘Return of the Storyteller’ tour that he did, every single one of the openers was a local East Nashville musician, where he basically shared his audience with them and shared them with his audience.

“It wasn’t even charity. It was just like you felt like you deserved to be there, and that was Todd, you know.”