Tommy "Snuff" Garrett born 5 July 1939

Snuff Garrett (July 5, 1938 – December 16, 2015) was an American record producer whose most famous work was during the 1960s and 1970s.

Thomas Lesslie Garrett was born in Dallas on July 5, 1938. His father, also named Thomas, was a lawyer and bail bondsman. His mother was the former Lila Ables. He got his nickname in South Oak Cliff High School. It was derived from Levi Garrett, a 
popular brand of snuff.  He quit high school in the ninth grade, was hired as an errand boy at a local radio station and then left for Hollywood with the hope of getting into the music business, but the closest he got was selling records in a store on Sunset Boulevard. Returning to Texas, he talked his way into disc jockey jobs in Dallas, Wichita Falls and Lubbock.

At seventeen, Garrett was a disc jockey in Lubbock, Texas, where he met Buddy Holly. He is often still mentioned on the Lubbock oldies station KDAV on a program hosted by his friend Jerry "Bo" Coleman. Garrett also worked in radio in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he performed on-air stunts. On February 3, 1959, Garrett broadcast his own tribute show to Holly after he was killed (along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper) in a plane crash in Iowa.

Snuff with Bobby Vee

In 1959, Garrett became a staff producer at Liberty Records in Hollywood at the age of 19, after having joined the label to work in the promotions department. Although not a musician, Garrett showed he had a knack for finding hit songs, going on to produce a string of hits and becoming the label's head of A&R until he left Liberty in 1966. His first job as producer for the label was on Johnny Burnette's "Settin' the Woods on Fire" on July 9, 1959. Among Garrett's roster of artists were Bobby Vee, Johnny Burnette, Gene McDaniels, Buddy Knox, Walter Brennan, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, and Del Shannon.

Snuff  & Leon Russell 

He was also responsible for hiring Phil Spector for a short period as an assistant producer. Many of Garrett's hit singles came from songs by the Brill Building songwriters in New York City. Others who worked closely with Garrett include future recording star Leon Russell, who often arranged his productions, and Lenny Waronker, Liberty co-founder Simon Waronker's son who became a producer in his own right and eventually president of Warner Bros. Records. Later, after leaving Liberty, Garrett worked with Cher and Sonny & Cher and had his own record labels, Snuff Garrett Records and Viva Records, which the catalogue was licensed to Warner Bros during the 1980s.

                               

Between 1961 and 1969, he released a series of over 25 instrumental albums, featuring solo guitar work by Tommy Tedesco, on Liberty Records by "The 50 Guitars of Tommy Garrett", six of which appeared on the Billboard Top LPs chart. 

In 1966, Garrett produced an album by singer-songwriter Sonny 
Curtis on the Viva label, The 1st of Sonny Curtis, which contains some of Curtis' most popular tunes, including "Walk Right Back" "My Way of Life", "Hung up in your Eyes", and "I Fought the Law and the Law Won.” Garrett was invited early on to produce the Monkees, but a test session did not go well, with the Monkees preferring to work with Boyce and Hart.

In addition to his hits with Sonny & Cher for Kapp Records and MCA Records in the 1970s, Garrett also produced Vicki Lawrence's "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" for Bell Records (a song written by Lawrence's then-husband Bobby Russell), and Tanya Tucker's "Lizzie and the Rainman" for MCA. 
Both of these songs had been intended for Cher; but her husband and manager at the time, Sonny Bono, thought it might offend Cher's Southern fans. Other artists produced by Garrett in the 1970s included Brenda Lee and "singing cowboy" Roy Rogers.

Garrett worked regularly with the Johnny Mann Singers and the Ron Hicklin Singers on many projects, and was responsible for the new sound of The Ray Conniff Singers in the early 1970s 

(which employed the Hicklin Singers), producing two albums with Conniff. Garrett also produced several tracks by Nancy Sinatra in the mid-1970s that were issued by Private Stock Records. In 1976, Garrett set up a sub-label of Casablanca Records, Casablanca West. The label released just one album and two singles before folding. In 1978, Garrett produced the country-oriented soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose, which appeared on Garrett's latter-day label, Viva Records.

In 1976, when home video was in its infancy, Garrett bought cassette rights to the old RKO, Republic and Hal Roach (Laurel and Hardy) films for what United Press International termed "a pittance." By 1980, the 800-title library of his company The 
Nostalgia Merchant was earning $2.3 million a year. "Nobody wanted cassettes four years ago ... It wasn't the first time people called me crazy. It was a hobby with me which became big business", Garrett told UPI.

Garrett lived in Bell Canyon, California in a ranch built for himself. He was was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, a month before he died of cancer at his ranch on December 16, 2015, at the age of 77

(Edited from Wikipedia & NY Times)