Gary Russell Sneddon bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. But the well-known cowboy singer/songwriter from the Kamas Valley turned down requests to play the jolly old fellow for 20 years after a traumatic experience he remains hesitant to talk about. “It was a gig I never wanted,” he says. That all changed in 2000, when America’s own celebrity domestic goddess made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Why the two-decade Santa hiatus? “It’s kind of a sad story,” he reluctantly relates. “In 1980, my wife suggested I could make a lot of money playing Santa. I grumbled but agreed, got a lot of work and it was OK for a year or so,” he says.
“But, when a little child sits on your lap and pours his heart out to you, he remembers who he’s talking to,” Sneddon continues. “In 1981, I was walking with my wife through a mall in Salt Lake City and a little kid came up to me with tears streaming down his face and asked me why he didn’t get what he asked me for at Christmas. That just tore me up. I told my wife right then that I’d never play Santa Claus again.” Fortunately, as with all good Christmas stories, there is a happy ending to this Yuletide tale.
Sneddon was born in 1939 in Bell, Calif., and grew up in the nearby town of Whittier. His mother divorced and remarried. His stepfather was a movie producer for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the storied cowboy couple of film and television dear to the hearts of the baby-boomer generation. “I spent a lot of my young life on movie sets with Roy, Dale and the Sons of the Pioneers, which ingrained cowboy music in my soul,” says Sneddon.
At age 16, he began collecting western Americana cowboy gear and memorabilia.
The southern California native was stricken with wanderlust at an early age. “All through high school, college and my single years, I’d occasionally hop freight trains,” he says. “I saw the American West and this nation from the open door of a box car. I have wonderful stories, pictures and memories of the people and places I encountered.”
He studied art at San Antonio and Fullerton junior colleges while working a succession of jobs. He was a street character at Knotts Berry Farm, a truck driver, salesman, sign painter and custom leather craftsman. At age 19, he was making a living painting cars when his career path took an abrupt turn. “A guy came in and wanted me to paint his old Chevy,” he recalls. “I noticed he had an old, beat-up Gibson guitar in the back seat. When he asked me how much I wanted to do the job, I pointed at the guitar and said that would do.”
Sneddon became a man obsessed. “I went home and locked myself in my room with that guitar for about a month. I taught myself a few chords and got some instruction from a friend who played. About three months later I formed a band called the Coachmen with a couple of buddies and hit the road. I shortened my name to just Gary Russell because most folks couldn’t get the full name right.”
That marked the beginning of a musical odyssey that took Sneddon all over the country and introduced him to a pantheon of cowboy, folk and country music stars. Over the next 20 years, he toured with legendary singers like Johnny Cash, Johnny Duncan, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Ann Murray, Barbara Mandrell and Charlie Daniels and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Sneddon met his wife, Carole, at a party back home in Whittier. The two dated for three years and married in 1963 in Las Vegas. They have three grown children, Elizabeth, Jon and Rebecca and seven grandchildren, all living in the Salt Lake Valley.
The talented singer/songwriter rose through the ranks of struggling musical artists to emerge as a successful performer in his own right. But the ride was not without its bumps. “In the late 1970s I had a band at a club in Orange County. We were working so hard and trying to raise three teenagers” he explains. “One day I suddenly realized the music business was controlling my life and something needed to change. We’d visited Utah before and knew it would be a better place to raise our family. So we pulled up stakes in 1979 and moved to Salt Lake City.”
Over the next 20 years, Sneddon settled into a more mundane but sane lifestyle in the Salt Lake Valley. He and his wife both worked at Hercules in Magna. He continued to perform regularly at venues throughout the area and re-engaged in his lifelong passion of collecting cowboy and western antiques and memorabilia.
Sneddon and his wife moved to Kamas Valley in 1999 when they accepted an offer to manage the Poison Creek Antique Store in Kamas. It was a perfect match, and they set to work building the store into a repository and museum for an astounding array of cowboy and western antiques and memorabilia.
He continues to play and sing at local venues and is a regular at Mountain Town Stages concerts, the Park City Arts Festival and the Heber Valley Cowboy Poetry Festival. He’s recorded several CDs, including a recently released Christmas album, available through his email address, [email protected]
It was at the Poison Creek store that Sneddon was again urged to play the part of Santa Claus by an improbable visitor. “Martha Stewart was in Utah skiing in 2000 and came into the store,” he recounts. “I always played the guitar and sang in the store while people perused the merchandise. I made up some songs about Stewart and her show on the spot. She left with several hundred dollars in merchandise and I guess I made an impression.
“That next fall she called and asked if I’d play Santa in her annual Christmas TV special. Now, a lot of folks had asked me to play the part since that awful experience in the mall and I’d always turned them down. But when a genuine American icon asked me, I couldn’t say no. I agreed to come to her TV studio in Connecticut, but with one caveat — there would be no children on my lap asking for presents. I didn’t want to see any more tears.”
Sneddon did the show, marking a high point in a storied singing and songwriting career which so far has spanned half-a-century. Now retired to a comfortable home in the Kamas Valley, he continues to collect western antiques and cowboy gear. He’s most proud of a unique bar built in England in 1878, which over the years has migrated from England to New York, to Magna, to his basement.
He continues to write and perform his beloved cowboy songs at areas venues and private parties. But don’t ask him to play Santa Claus. “Martha’s a tough act to follow,” he grins.
VITAL STATISTICS:
Age 69; married to wife Carole for 45 years; three children; seven grandchildren
Favorite foods: Mexican
Favorite reading: American history
Favorite music: Cowboy, not to be confused with country and western music
Animal companions: Two Vizslas [Hungarian hunting dogs], Peaches and Precious