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Born in the tobacco rich Piedmont of North Carolina, and later moving
as teen to Muscle
Shoals/Florence Alabama, M.T.Leon was baptized in the Blues early on. While
working in the summer on the tobacco farm, cropping and barning
tobacco, break times and sometimes early evenings were spent listening
to old songs, and stories by the older black men he worked with.
Late at night M.T. would lay on his pallet in that old farm shack,
trying to catch the far off distant signal of
WLAC radio in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sometimes
he was almost too tired to work in those fields after a night with
the Hoss Man, John R., and the endless pitching of hypnotic Blues
and Gospel of Randy's Record Mart. M.T. discovered that the rock
hero's of the day were stealing songs and calling them there own.
M.T. had begun to play the guitar by the fourth grade in school,
so by the time he was 15 years old he already started playing some
of the clubs in the area. He was so excited when he was paid that
first $7.00. He developed a burning desire to discover where his
first love originated. His school, became the Black Churches and
the "Chitlin' Circuit,"
studying the extensive record collection he was acquiring and playing
guitar throughout the South and Eastern Seaboard, developing what
eventually became his nickname, "MT" / "Magic Tone". Before he was
20 he had performed at Carnegie Hall, and the Apollo Theatre
in New York, and on the same stages with the likes of Candi Staton,
Clarence Carter, Tower of Power, Graham Central Station, Sly Stone.
Barely
a man, he had the wonderful experience of meeting one of his mentors,
Freddie King , and was able to
jam with him in a motel in Florence, Alabama after bringing Freddie
and his band some "party favors". M.T. tried to raise a family on
the road, but ended up putting the guitar down for a while and went
into business in Florida, becoming the Music Director of a Baptist
Church, and working in sales and marketing for a Nashville record
distributor. After a couple of failed marriages, and much heartache,
and troubles, the Blues really began to mean more to M.T. than they
ever had as a young man. He decided in 1999, to "come home" to his
roots, and begin his career all over again. He resides near the
Devil's Backbone, or the famous Natchez Trace,
where he cattle farms between rare concert performances. |