Murray Franklin “Buddy” Cannon, born in Lexington, Tennessee, on April 20, 1947, became a Nashville-based songwriter, record producer, music publisher, and former record company A&R executive whose work made him one of the most successful Nashville record producers of recent decades. He worked with artists including George Jones, Joe Nichols, John Michael Montgomery, Kenny Chesney, Merle Haggard, Reba McEntire, and Willie Nelson; as A&R director for Mercury Records, he brought Billy Ray Cyrus, Sammy Kershaw, and Shania Twain to the label; and as a songwriter, he wrote hits for George Strait, Mel Tillis, Vern Gosdin, and Willie Nelson. After learning guitar with help from his uncle, Dalton Tate, he performed on Lexington radio station WDXL, played with the Rhodes Boys and other local bands, then moved after high school to Chicago to work as a musician in a country band. Six years later he moved to Nashville, found work playing bass with Bob Luman, and began writing songs. Mel Tillis heard Cannon’s demos and hired him as a songwriter, song-plugger, and bass player, and in 1978 Tillis had a No. 1 country hit with Cannon’s cowritten song “I Believe in You.” Cannon studied production techniques through Jimmy Bowen and through demo sessions for Tillis’ Sawgrass Music and Sabal Music. After Tillis sold his publishing companies to PolyGram Music in 1987, Cannon was one of only two staff members retained. In 1988 he cowrote Vern Gosdin’s No. 1 country hit “Set ’em Up Joe,” and in 1989 he cowrote George Strait’s No. 1 single “I’ve Come to Expect It from You.” He also placed songs with Glen Campbell and Alabama, and when Harold Shedd became head of PolyGram Records’ Mercury Nashville label, Cannon moved from publishing into A&R. At Mercury Records he helped sign several top-selling artists, and his first artist as a producer was Sammy Kershaw, whose 1993 No. 1 hit “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful” he produced. Cannon and Norro Wilson also produced George Jones’ “High-Tech Redneck.” After leaving PolyGram in 1996, Cannon joined Wilson in 1998 to form Bud-Ro Productions. They had earlier produced Kenny Chesney’s first gold album, I Will Stand, and Cannon has since coproduced every Kenny Chesney album from I Will Stand onward, with total sales exceeding 30 million SoundScan units. He also produced albums by Alison Krauss, Chely Wright, Chris Young, David Lee Murphy, Jamey Johnson, Reba McEntire, and Sara Evans. The Willie Nelson albums he produced were among the most highly acclaimed of Nelson’s later career, and in 2016 Cannon received a Grammy award for the album Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin.