"Music has always played a major role in my life. As a fresh-faced teenager I played the piano - until football and other sports got in the way. For a year or so music was transposed to a minor key. Then Elvis, Buddy Holly, and others aroused my passion for music again."
When Terry left school and started working in a grocery warehouse, a workmate introduced him to the music of Hank Williams. He admits that at first he wasn't too impressed with Hank and returned the albums after listening to them only once or twice. "I was a devout rock 'n' roll fan and saved hard to buy my first guitar. (Actually, it was my second guitar- my very first was my mother's frying pan which I ingeniously strung with fishing line. I played it throughout the week but kept it hidden under my bed on fry days). Having learned the all important three-chord trick (that B7 took some mastering) I imagined myself becoming a budding Holly or Elvis."

He practised for hours on end, posing in front of the bathroom mirror with his hair ("I had some in those days," he adds) hung over his eyes and his guitar slung provocatively around his neck. Strangely, the songs that came readily to his lips were not Peggy Sue or All Shook Up but Your Cheatin' Heart and Jambalaya. He asked to borrow the Hank Williams' albums again and quickly learned all of the songs, word for word, chord for chord. "I no longer wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star - a Country singer is what I wanted to be."
Soon he was taking his guitar around the local pubs and clubs offering to sing for free. He felt he needed to test his abilities in front of various audiences even if for most of the time they were drunk and noisy or noisy and impatient for the Bingo to start. It was a hard way to start but it prepared him for later when he became a Redcoat at Butlin's Holiday Camp at Skegness, Lincolnshire, in 1970. At the end of the season, he turned professional and within a year or so was performing in a wider range of venues.

In 1971 Terry won the Wrangler Country Song Writing Contest, with a prize of two weeks in America including a week in Nashville where he performed on WSM TV and on an International Country Music Festival.  On his return to the UK, he began appearing in Concerts, Country Music Clubs and Festivals. Over the next few years, he appeared on shows with many top American and British Country Music acts: Tom T Hall, Hank Williams Jnr, Boxcar Willie, Mo Bandy, Tammy Wynette, The Hillsiders, Tony Goodacre and many others. He has also performed on shows with non-country acts, including Bobby Davro, Tony Hatch & Jackie Trent, and Bert Weedon, his first "guitar hero." And for those of you old enough to remember Lenny the Lion, Terry was his pianist and special guest on several of his shows... but that's another story.

Terry continued to perform at a wide variety of venues throughout the '70s & into the '80s. By this time, his song-list consisted of a high percentage of his own work. In 1980, he became the Country Music Presenter for Hereward Radio, Peterborough. During his ten years with the station, his studio guests included Bobby Bare (one of his all-time favourite artists) Nanci Griffith, Dwight Yoakam, Ed Bruce, Lynn Anderson, Raymond Froggatt, and Daniel O'Donnell.

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