Ed Snodderly has always sounded like someone who doesn’t merely play roots music, but inhabits it. After almost 50 years of songwriting, ES Pearl Presents… Baggage Flies Free finds him adopting the ES Pearl name – a nod to his family – and making an album steeped in Appalachian music without ever sounding like an exercise in nostalgia.
Indeed, “Coming Down This Road” is pretty much the perfect introduction. Tim O’Brien’s mandolin and vocals help give it a bluegrass pulse, but there’s a looseness here that’s crucial. Snodderly isn’t interested in polishing the character out of these songs. His weathered voice and wonderful way with words are the point.
“Willow Green” is gentler, fiddle adding colour, while “That I Need You More Than I Have Ever Now” – even the title feels unmistakably Snodderly – shifts keys and demonstrates how sophisticated this seemingly simple music can be.
That’s true throughout. “The Place” has the feel of a story being passed around rather than performed, while “Fixing This Old Gate” takes something utterly ordinary and finds something bigger within it. That’s Snodderly’s gift: places, people and memories matter here.
Nowhere is that more obvious than “For Another Time”. Written for his late friend Malcolm Holcombe, it’s enormously affecting without needing to strain for emotion. Given Holcombe appeared on Snodderly’s Chimney Smoke, there’s an extra poignancy to it too. “See You In The Morning” follows with the same warmth that runs through the whole collection.
“When Doc Watson Come To Johnson City”, again featuring O’Brien, is another remembrance, Snodderly recalling Watson playing close to home. It’s less a tribute than oral history set to music, exactly the sort of thing these traditions were built upon.
“This Old Guitar”, featuring Verlon Thompson, feels similarly timeless. That’s perhaps the key word for the whole record. Kenny Vaughan, Steve Hinson, Daniel Kimbro, John Gardner and the rest of the superb cast never overwhelm the songs; everything exists to serve them.
“The Grandest Tail” is wonderfully understated, while “High In The Rhyme” brings Amythyst Kiah into the mix for one of the album’s finest vocal combinations. By the time “Will Your Down Home Be Unbroken” and the closing “It’s Christmas Again” arrive, you realise how effortlessly Snodderly has created his own little world.
Baggage Flies Free isn’t attempting to modernise Appalachian music, nor preserve it behind glass. It’s simply allowing the tradition to continue doing what it always has: telling stories.
There aren’t many people better qualified to tell them than Ed Snodderly.
