Review:'SNODDERLY, ED' 'ES Pearl Presents Baggage Flies Free'
- Label: 'Majestic Records/Need to Know Music'
- Genre: 'Alt/Country'
- Release Date: '19th June 2026'
Our Rating:
Eddie Lynn - Ed -Snodderly was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1952. In 2001 he was honoured by Nashville’s Country Music Hall Of Fame.
For his latest album he adopts a playful alias of ES Pearl deriving from the fact that his Grandma was Pearlie Belle, his Mom is Willie Pearl and his daughter is named Lyra Pearl.
He honors the memory of fellow journeymen in Malcolm Holcombe- For Another Time and When Doc Watson Come to Johnson City.
The jaunty love song That I Need You More Than I Have Ever Now and the affectionate See You In the Morning express gratitude for a long-lasting relationship (“We never married, we just hung on tight”).
Aside from assistance from Music City musicians, contemporary Bluegrass singer Tim O'Brien joins Snodderly for Coming Down This Road while Tennessee singer songwriter Amythyst Kiah guests on the Dylanesque High In the Rhyme .
This is an album of straightedge country music performed by an artist who has been round the block many times and still retains a love of well-crafted acoustic songs.
Odes to a favourite guitar and a song about fixing a gate show that this is not a songwriter with any political remit and the emphasis is on documenting his own life and loves.
If you accept these modest parameters it works just fine and as Snodderly states, not unreasonably, ”If you don’t like these songs, write some you like.”
