Hard Working Americans sing for the common man

After making his name as a scruffy roots-rocker and silver-tongued folk singer, Todd Snider spent the past several years dipping his toes into the jam band world. So it’s no surprise his most recent project, Hard Working Americans, started out as a merger of Snider’s primary interests: sharp songwriting and superlative playing. The seeds for the band were sown a couple years ago when Snider played a show in California with Dave Schools, longtime bassist for Athens jam giants Widespread Panic. “Todd’s like, ‘Jam bands spend a lot of time learning how to play and they get a bad rap for not being able to write songs,’” Schools says with a laugh. “So that was his plan: Let me pick a bunch of songs that friends of mine have written or that I think are really great songs and let’s put a dream band together and put some musicality to it.”

They did just that. With Snider out front and Schools on bass, Hard Working Americans’ lineup also includes guitarist Neal Casal, who has played with Ryan Adams and Chris Robinson, plus keyboardist Chad Staehly (Great American Taxi), guitarist Jesse Aycock, and drummer Duane Trucks, who has toured with Panic and is the younger brother of guitarist Derek Trucks. The group gathered at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios in California and recorded songs Snider had collected by folks such as Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Hayes Carll, Brian Henneman of the Bottle Rockets, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

The songs were chosen to tell the story of a frustrated blue-collar worker, and the performances are inspired, from the solid Schools/Trucks rhythm section to Snider’s vocals, which are as consistently melodic — and less talking-blues — as anything he’s done in years. As a whole, the band’s self-titled album doesn’t wander into jam territory too much. This is pure Americana music, from the bluesy swagger of “Blackland Farmer” and the Southern rock crunch of “Another Train” to the gospel-tinged beauty of “Down to the Well” and the smoldering struggle anthem “Welfare Music.”

“We put this band together of people who’d never really played together and it wound up being sort of explosive,” Schools says.

TRI’s in-house filmmaker Justin Kreutzmann followed Hard Working Americans from the beginning, resulting in a new documentary, The First Waltz, that captures a band being born. Last winter, that band entered the studio and recorded several original songs for a second album. “Neal and Jesse, apparently, have been saving up garage-psych riffs for the past 20 years,” Schools says.

So momentum is on Hard Working Americans’ side, and the band plans to let it guide the way. “Todd knows he can cobble together an award-winning folk record in a couple of weeks,” Schools says. “But he’s like, ‘I wanna hear what you guys can do with this song.’ He’s very giving with his stuff but he’s also very precise in what he thinks is cool.”

Snider’s days of dipping his toes into the jam scene are over, in other words. Now, he’s diving in.