Tony will tell you jokingly that he "came out of the hollers of West Virginia when [he] was twenty-five." Most of his family, including his father, his close and distant cousins, and practically all of his aunts and uncles play instruments and sing. Family reunions always included gospel family groups, bluegrass bands, and pickers from all over West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio--real "family" entertainment. In his early youth, Tony spent most of his time playing baseball, the guitar, writing songs, drawing, reading, wandering through the woods, wading creekbeds, turning rocks to look for crawdads, and contemplating the universe.
After winning a True-Value Country Showdown in the tri-state area, Tony and his Dixie Flyer Band travelled extensively, playing close to three-hundred dates at fairs and festivals from 1993 to 1995. All the while, Tony was balancing his graduate school education with his rising popularity and the public demand for his versatile but still country voice.
In August of 1995, Tony had packed his U-Haul for Ada, Ohio, where he would have spent the next three years, after successfully defending his Master's thesis in English Literature at Marshall University, attending Ohio Northern Law School. But the last Friday of the month before Monday morning classes met, Tony received a phone call from Buddy Cannon (producer: Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Vern Gosdin, Sammy Kershaw) that would change everything. Tony and Buddy would work extensively together during his first few months in Nashville, but his writing career and uncompromising artistic sensibilties would steer him away from the world of major labels at the time and place him where he was most happy, creating the kind of country music he loves--the kind that was all his own.
Tony has credits on songs recorded by Trisha Yearwood, Craig Morgan, Trent Tomlinson, Bucky Covington, John Michael Montgomery, Doug Stone, The Stephens Sisters, Johnny Bush, Kevin Denny, Clay Walker, George Strait, and many other artists out of Nashville. His own albums sell on Itunes.com, CDBaby, and two dozen other mp3 download sites across the world wide web. Since 2003, Tony has been touring in Texas (his new adoptive home away from home) during the summers, has an office on Music Row with Davis Music Group Nashville, contracts out to sing for other writers on the row who need a voice for their songs, has a house in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Debbie, and two children, Savannah and Logan.
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