About jeffmcmahon

JEFF MCMAHON – Since 1993 Keyboards, background vocals

I grew up in Gainesville, Texas, playing piano and stuff in school. It was a small town and I didn’t know guitar players and people like that; the people that I knew were all in a band or choir in school. I went to Baylor University and I wound up playing in my first country band with a couple of college buddies, Brett Beavers and Deryl Dodd, who later moved to Nashville and had their songs cut by Tim. When that band broke up I moved to Nashville and worked with a guy named Butch Baker, then with a group called Canyon for about a year and then I started doing some showcase work for some writers that worked for Byron Gallimore’s publishing company, which is how I met Tim. Byron was one of the people that recommended me to Tim. I auditioned for Tim and started playing with him in March of ’93. When he hired me I think it was as much for the fact that I’m real physical on stage as it was for my playing. The day Tim hired me, he was at Deryl Dodd’s birthday party and ran into a guy that I had worked for before, and this guy told Tim, "Man, I don’t know if you want to hire that McMahon guy because he’s really flashy onstage and he’ll just try to steal the spotlight." And Tim told me he thought that that was a great reason to hire me.