Zeb Snyder

The Snyders have lived around Lexington for generations, and Zeb and Samantha were home-schooled with music at the center of their lessons. He began classical guitar in the Suzuki method at seven and turned to bluegrass flatpicking at eleven. He won the top prize, a Wayne Henderson guitar, at the Jimmy Edmonds Homecoming Competition at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, Virginia, in 2007, and first place in the adult guitar contest at the Mount Airy Bluegrass and Fiddlers Convention in June 2009. When the children took up bluegrass the family needed a bass player, so they gave Bud a bass for his birthday and Zeb taught him to play it; their mother, Laine, sometimes joined them to sing.

The Snyder Family Band, a trio of guitar, fiddle and bass that never played full-time, recorded for Mountain Roads, starting with Comin’ on Strong (2010), made when Zeb was fourteen, then Stages (2011) and Building Bridges (2013), and moved to Mountain Home for Wherever I Wander (2015), on which he also plays mandolin, and The Life We Know (2017), on which he sings the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Blue Ridge Mountain Sky.” The band played MerleFest and the Wayne C. Henderson Festival and was an invited showcase band at the IBMA. Zeb and Samantha also played on the Mountain Roads collection Close Kin (2011), backing Jeanette Williams on “Little Bird of Heaven,” and Adam Steffey featured them on his old-time album New Primitive (Organic, 2013), with Zeb on guitar on most tracks, among them “Raleigh and Spencer.” He graduated with honors from High Point University in mathematical economics, and in 2017 he was teaching guitar and mandolin lessons online.

His guitar models begin with Tony Rice and take in Bryan Sutton and Jerry Reed, and his own listening runs to Southern rock, blues, jam bands and bebop. Appalachian Road Show, formed by Barry Abernathy, Darrell Webb and Jim VanCleve, played its first show at the IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in 2018 with Todd Phillips on bass and Snyder on guitar, and he is on all three of its Billy Blue albums: Barry Abernathy and Darrell Webb Present Appalachian Road Show (October 2018), where he shares the guitar parts with Bryan Sutton, Tribulation (March 2020) and Jubilation (October 2022).