You might say music is in his background. You might say it’s in his blood. You might even say he was born to it. Either way, T. C. Taylor had no choice. Music surrounded him from an early age. “My grandparents ran a dancehall in central Texas and I got a lot of early exposure to some really good Texas bands. Dad played as well. I remember being three or four, napping back behind stage and playing on the floor while I listened to him.” T. C. first tested the waters while still in high school, with a band called Moon Valley. They kicked around central Texas for awhile, but never really did much. The band broke up shortly after it was started. A year or so later, a group out of Nashville was invited to play at the senior prom in their hometown, Heidenheimer, Texas. It happened that Heidenheimer was also T.C.’s hometown and it was his senior prom. T. C. got to meet and talk with Mike Mahler, and Angela and Joey Cainan. “It was a great experience for me. They convinced me the best avenue to achieve what I wanted, was to move to Nashville. Believe it or not, there wasn’t a big demand for country music at that time. It was really tough to get any exposure around home.” So, after the frustration of trying to do something on the local scene, and wanting to take a more serious route, T. C. packed up and moved to Nashville. Sharing a little house with a group of aspiring singer/song writers, T. C. learned the ropes and honed another skill . . . writing. He’d known all along he had the talent for it, but lacked the skills. He started going to “writer nights” at the local clubs. At 19, he was too young to get in most of the places he played without his talent as an excuse. It was through the talent nights and writers nights that T. C. met, played with and got to know musicians who had performed with artists such as Reba McIntyre, Hank, Jr., Keith Whitley and Vince Gill. Through one of the steel players he’d met, T. C. was able to do his first demo, giving him something credible to present. And in 1998, he hooked up with Texhoma Publishing, doing demos and working with Warner Western and Atlantic. Unfortunately, it was about this time that T. C. had hit the point where he’d had enough of “Music Row”. “There didn’t seem to be a set course. I mean, if you’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to college for 7 or 8 years. You’ll get certain credits and degrees. With music, there was no technique to getting to where I wanted to be.” Other than the showcases he’d performed in Nashville, there was really no place to exhibit the “whole package” (singer, musician, stage presence, writing ability). T. C. decided to move back to Texas where he knew there were now places to play and where he knew acts like Hal Ketchum and Radney Foster were getting signed. Back in Texas, T. C. met a director who got him an audition at Six Flags Fiesta Texas where he was hired to sing the country shows. After a year at Fiesta Texas, he hit the clubs and dancehalls again. Meanwhile, Texhoma Publishing had begun to talk about putting together a record with the kind of music T. C. longed to do: Real Country. And in the summer of ’99 T. C. cut “Putting the Western Back in Country”. “I’ve got a lot of things happening in Nashville and in San Antonio. So, it’s all starting to fall into place to where people will say, ‘Oh, T. C. Taylor...this is what he does. This is his style of music.’ That’s my goal.”