In The Round with Tony Arata, Thomm Jutz & Ed Snodderly
with Tony Arata, Thomm Jutz, Ed Snodderly
CST
(Doors: 20:30 pm )
$20 / $12 food/bev minimum
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THIS IS A PREPAID SHOW, REFUNDS ARE NOT AVAILABLE.
There are 18 tables, 8 bar seats and 8 church pew seats available for reservation. The remaining pew seats for this show are not reserved in advance. These seats are available on a first come/first served basis when doors open.
Ticket reservations at The Bluebird Cafe are an agreement to pay the non-refundable cover charge and applicable taxes/fees and to meet the $12.00 per seat food and/or drink minimum.
Note: When making reservations, choose the table you would like and then add the number of seats you need to your cart by using the + button. You are NOT reserving an entire table if you choose 1 (by choosing 1, you are reserving 1 seat). We reserve ALL seats at each table. If you are a smaller party at a larger table, you will be seated with guests outside your party.
Artists
Tony Arata
Tony Arata was born in Savannah, GA and grew up on nearby Tybee Island. While studying for a journalism degree from Georgia Southern University, he began performing his original songs in local bands. In 1986, he and his wife Jaymi moved to Nashville where his unique, soulful style began to get the attention of people like Allen Reynolds and Garth Brooks. Garth, to date, has recorded seven of Tony’s songs, and “The Dance” won song of the year at The Academy of Country Music and received both a Country Music Association and a Grammy nomination, as well as a most performed song in Radio and Records Magazine.
Tony is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (2012). He has also had No. 1 records with “Here I Am” for Patty Loveless, “I’m Holding My Own” for Lee Roy Parnell, and “Dreaming With My Eyes Open” for Clay Walker. Other artists who have recorded his songs include Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Trisha Yearwood, Delbert McClinton, Don Williams, Reba McEntire, Suzy Bogguss, and Hal Ketchum.
Tony has also recorded four solo albums featuring new songs, covers, and guest appearances by many of Nashville’s finest musicians as well as folks who have recorded his songs, including Garth, Patty, and Lee Roy.
Thomm Jutz
Raised in the Black Forest of Germany, Thomm Jutz has become an American roots music treasure. Jutz (it’s pronounced “Yootz”) was a young, classically trained musician in Germany when he heard Outlaw legend Bobby Bare sing on a television show and decided to devote his life to informal music. He saved money, won the immigration lottery (yes, there is such a thing), and eventually moved to Nashville, where he found work touring with Nanci Griffith, Mary Gauthier, David Olney, Kim Richey, and many more. He built a recording studio and produced albums for Country Music Hall of Fame members Bill Anderson and Mac Wiseman, among many others. He sings of mill workers, Civil War characters, folk heroes, struggle, heartbreak, and triumph. In a time of division, he seeks and finds connection.
His virtuosity, eloquence, and clarity of expression have made him a linchpin of Nashville’s creative community, and in 2020 his To Live in Two Worlds, Volume 1 was nominated for the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy, making him the first immigrant to receive a nomination in that category.
He’s earned four nominations and a 2021 win for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Songwriter of the Year award and is a current lecturer of songwriting at Belmont University. He has written numerous Bluegrass number ones, and his songs have been recorded by John Prine, Nanci Griffith, The Steel Drivers, Balsam Range, and more. He’s had over 250 film and TV placements of his music worldwide. Jutz is featured in the Country Music Hall of Fame’s American Currents exhibit, slated to run 2022-2023.
Ed Snodderly
Recalling the modern, esoteric lyricism of Guy Clark and Billy Joe Shaver and the Southern traditions of old-time music and bluegrass, veteran Americana singer- songwriter-guitar player Ed Snodderly’s new album Chimney Smoke, (his 10th), is a hypnotic, slow-burning masterpiece of expert songcraft and storytelling. Often wistful and nostalgic, with unforgettable characters, indelible memories and a sense of place at its heart, Chimney Smoke bears the marks of a pugilist’s nimble agility and endurance but occasionally also delivers a knockout blow or two. Case in point: “Gone With Gone and Long Time,” a dazzling meditation on the stages of grief. “It’s a song about loss as much as it is emphatic about dark,” Snodderly says of the track, which features harmony vocals from Hall of Fame songwriter Gretchen Peters. Aided throughout by “the Shoestring Seven,” a who’s-who of veteran musicians including Shawn Camp, Steve Conn, John Gardner, Steve Hinson, Gary J. Smith, Chris Scruggs and Kenny Vaughan, the album also features singers Amythyst Kiah, Maura O’Connell, Malcolm Holcombe and more.
Chimney Smoke had its origins in Snodderly’s desire not only to make the best record possible but in the concept of creating a quintessential “Southern” album, a chronicle of both his Appalachian roots and his own personal upbringing. The title track “Chimney Smoke” offers a vivid depiction of Appalachian life, and is one of the prime examples of Snodderly’s gift for bringing memories and a deep sense of place to life with his intimate lyrics.
To help add masterful strokes of color, shade and texture to an already vibrant narrative, Snodderly enlisted Grammy-nominated producer R.S. Field (Todd Snider, Shaver, Justin Townes Earle, Allison Moorer, etc.). Another of the notable participants in the recording of Chimney Smoke would also prove one of its most poignant, as the album was the final project completed by beloved Grammy-winning recording engineer and producer Bil VornDick, who passed away in July 2022.
Eddie Lynn Snodderly was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a father who was a Fuller Brush salesman and a mother who was, in his words, a “housewife extraordinaire.” Snodderly’s grandfather was a farmer and old-time fiddler, who, along with his brother, won several ribbons at Knoxville-area fiddlers’ conventions in the 1920s and ’30s. Snodderly started playing guitar at age 12, enamored of the music of the British invasion, while also absorbing the old-time music played by family members that was simply part of the Snodderly’s homespun DNA.
In 1976, Snodderly co-founded (with friend Joe “Tank” Leach) the now-iconic music venue, the Down Home Coffeehouse and Pickin’ Parlor in Johnson City, TN.
Long known as The Down Home, it’s an intimate listening room that has played host to countless acts in bluegrass, folk, old-time and blues music. Recognized for its eclecticism by numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Down Home has also spotlighted everything from theatrical productions, poetry and story slams, to political rallies and funerals. “I don’t know if it’s ancestral or all these ghosts that are drifting around here in the mountains, but it’s a special place,” Snodderly says, which, like his music, has its deepest roots in his upbringing. “Since I was six years old I’ve always loved having a clubhouse, building them out in the woods in the middle of a pasture field with a couple of friends,” says Snodderly.
Snodderly would continue to mix his life as a traveling musician with running the club, always looking forward to getting back to the Down Home. Decades before the blending of numerous roots musical styles would give rise to the genre now known as Americana, a wide array of artists graced the Down Home stage, including New Grass Revival, Norman Blake, John Hartford, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Queen Ida, Koko Taylor, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Townes van Zandt, to name just a few. “It’s always been a juggling act for me between performing, writing and club-running, but I’ve been lucky, and doing it so long that it’s all a part of the act.” Snodderly would go on to immortalize the club in his song “Down Home,” a spirited talking-blues track from his 2017 album, Record Shop.
Since his 1977 debut album, Sidewalk Shoes, Snodderly has released LPs on Sugar Hill and other prestigious roots-oriented labels. In addition to his solo work, he also recorded and performed as the Brother Boys with duet partner Eugene Wolf. Songs that he’s written have been covered by Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, John Cowan, Missy Raines and others, and in 2000, he played a minor role (credited as “Village Idiot”) in the Coen Brothers’ film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The recipient of a 2020 lifetime achievement award from the Southern Region of Folk Alliance 2020 for his contributions to Southern folk music, Snodderly also has the third verse of his song, “The Diamond Stream,” permanently displayed on the Wall of Honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Since 1992 he has been teaching songwriting classes in the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program at East Tennessee State University, where one of his most high-profile students in recent years, Amythyst Kiah, made a lasting impression, leading to her remarkable vocal contributions to three cuts on the new album.
“He’s so eccentric and a genius to boot,” Snodderly says of producer, R.S. Field. “His mantra was, ‘Let’s make Americana great again.’”
With sparkling lyrics, mind-expanding wit and down-home wisdom, that’s exactly what Ed Snodderly’s Chimney Smoke does.
