In October 2012, Todd Snider performed a show in Austin at the Moody Theater, backed by Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell. The up-and-coming Americana couple’s wedding was just a few months away, and it would be officiated by none other than Snider, a fact Snider loved to brag about.
Snider, who died on Friday at 59, was in fine form that evening, telling his usual stories and singing his usual songs, the type of world-class storytelling-songwriter show Snider put on every single night. But the evening’s highlight, the moment that made this show something else altogether, came late in the set. Snider has released a tribute album to his foremost hero, Jerry Jeff Walker, earlier that spring, and toward the end of his performance, he played a few of Walker’s songs.
Before one of them, “Mr. Bojangles,” Snider told his famous story about the song: After a show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few years back, Snider and Walker had walked around the deserted town when they encountered a lonely busker playing “Mr. Bojangles,” Walker’s song, to nobody on the street.
Snider relayed the story with his typical charm. (When a woman in the audience kept screaming, “Why are you so cute?” and interrupting his story, Snider responded, “I told you to wait in the truck.”) He concluded the tale with the image of Walker dropping money in the hat of the lonely busker without saying a word. “I thought to myself, ‘It must’ve been something good I did in a previous life, because I didn’t do something in this life worth that’ … and I was grateful I got to be there for that moment.”
Snider then starts strumming “Mr. Bojangles,” with Shires on fiddle. A few seconds later, the crowd erupted when Walker, then 70, walked onstage, bowed his hat, then started dancing.
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What followed was a celebratory cover of a song Walker had sung thousands of times by that point, mentor and mentee sharing the microphone for the chorus. Snider, Isbell, and Shires lightly accompany him, reveling in the moment and smiling as Walker, who’d largely stopped performing by that point, hams it up with the Austin crowd.
The entire video — the story, the cameo, the lovely performance itself — is more than worth the eight-minute watch. But there’s one moment, above all, that makes this video one of the best (and last) remaining things on the internet: the look on Snider’s face when his hero, the man responsible for him beginning his own career as a singer-songwriter decades prior, first joins him onstage: Snider’s mouth opened wide, and he started to grin big. He looked joyful, like he couldn’t believe his career has led to a moment like this. He looked like someone who can’t complain.
