Todd Snider | Courtesy Gold Mountain Entertainment

Todd Snider played a Kirk Avenue Music-promoted gig at The Sanctuary way back on Sept. 20, and now I can post the video. Woot!

Anyway, he had a full house, including Corey Hunley on the front row. (You can definitely hear Snider’s influence in some of Hunley’s music). Surely Mr. Hunley and any other songwriter in the room got a huge kick out of Snider’s spoken introduction to “Ballad of the Devil’s Backbone Tavern,” which essentially apes the ragtime of such songs as Robert Johnson’s “Red Hot” and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”

It was one of the first numbers he wrote, and he told the story of his earlier forays into songwriting and some sage yet hilarious advice he received when first setting out on that path.