William Garrett Walden, known as W. G. Snuffy Walden, is an American musician and composer of film and television soundtracks. Walden is an Emmy Award winner for the theme music to The West Wing, has been nominated for numerous Emmys throughout his career, and has received 26 BMI Awards.
Early life
Walden was born in Louisiana on February 13, 1950, and raised in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Lamar High School in Houston in 1967. In college he studied science and math, and he put himself through school working on a late-night radio show at KRBE in Houston and playing guitar in a strip club. Walden's middle name was his mother's maiden name, and this was the origin of his nickname. Members of his mother's family had sometimes been called Snuffy after the Southernsnuff manufacturer Levi Garrett. His family and schoolmates addressed him as Garrett, but Snuffy began to stick when he was away at summer camp and the name was preferred by fellow musicians as his career began.
Musical career
In the late 1960s, Walden dropped out of school, quit his job, and devoted his energies to the guitar full-time, picking up a bass player and drummer to form a three-piece band named Aphrodite. They started touring and wound up in Denver, playing local clubs and opening for acts like Buddy Miles. It was in Denver that Emerson, Lake & Palmer's manager, Neville Chesters, saw them in a club and offered them a recording contract with ELP's label, Manticore. In 1972, the group moved to England and was reformed, keeping Al Roberts and changing the name to Stray Dog. There, they were signed to Manticore and Greg Lake produced three songs from their first album Stray Dog. The new group toured with ELP as the opening act, but never really took flight, and eventually folded. Following the breakup of the band, Walden supplanted the ailing Paul Kossoff by providing guitar tracks for Free's final album Heartbreaker, which was released in 1973. He also played electric guitar in 1973, on the debut solo album Still by King Crimson lyricist, Peter Sinfield. In 1975, he joined The Eric Burdon Band and performed with them for a year. In 1975, Walden moved to Los Angeles and spent the rest of the decade performing as a solo artist and supporting artists such as Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, and Eric Burdon. Notably, in 1975-6 he again filled in for Paul Kossoff as a session musician on Back Street Crawler's Second Street album. By the mid-1980s, television agents and producers became aware of Walden through his local performances in Santa Monica. When approached to score a new television show, Walden had mixed feelings but accepted the offer. "I could see the handwriting on the wall for touring," he would later remember, "and it wasn't pretty. I kept envisioning Holiday Inn at age 60." The television show he was hired for was thirtysomething, which turned out to be a major hit television series and dramatically altered Walden's music career. Following his success as a touring and session musician and an Emmy nomination for the "Theme from Thirtysomething", Walden scored numerous television series, including Roseanne, Ellen, My So-Called Life, Felicity, Early Edition, Sports Night, The West Wing, George Lopez, I'll Fly Away, The Stand, Huff, Once and Again, Friday Night Lights and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In the summer of 2001, Walden released a solo album of mainly acoustic guitar pieces titled Music by... W. G. Snuffy Walden. The album included expanded or full versions of many of Walden's themes, such as "Once and Again", "Eugene's Ragtop", "Thirtysomething ", and "West Wing Suite". In July 2002, Tom Guerra conducted a comprehensive interview of Walden for Vintage Guitar Magazine. In April 2008, Stephen J. Abramson interviewed Walden for a four-hour, multi-part video series for the Television Academy. In March 2018, Up to Snuff, a documentary film about Walden's career, won the documentary competition in its premier at the Pasadena International Film Festival. In September 2018, Walden starred in a 1950s style cover of Africa by Toto along with the musical collective Postmodern Jukebox on YouTube.
