Terry Talbot (Mason Proffit)

Terry Talbot – Singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Born in Missouri and raised in Oklahoma, Terry Talbot moved to Indianapolis with his family as a late teenager in 1963. During his high school years, he played acoustic guitar and sang in a folk-group called the Quinchords, which included his younger brother Terry, his sister Tanni, and Tom Wright of the Wright Brothers. While a student at Purdue University, Terry Talbot started playing in local bands and joined a popular Hoosier group called Sounds Unlimited in the mid to late 1960s. (He and John also played in folk-rock band called Fourscore.) When Sounds Unlimited dissolved, he and his younger brother John Michael Talbot formed Mason Proffit, a Chicago-based country rock band that had a large regional following and experienced moderate success on the national level. With Terry singing lead and writing the majority of its songs, Mason Proffit recorded five albums, three of which charted on the Billboard 200. The band’s best known single was Talbot’s “Two Hangmen,” an anti-war song of 1969. Known for its high energy shows, the band performed around 300 times a year and opened for The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, John Denver, Dan Fogelberg, Mac Davis, Pink Floyd, The Byrds, Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin. In 1973, the Talbot brothers broke up the band to pursue a duet career, which resulted in three albums (the first with Warner and the remaining two on Sparrow Records). During the 1970s, the brothers often opened for the Eagles, who ironically had been influenced by the sound of Mason Proffit. Around the same time, Terry played guitar with Glenn Campbell, Chad Mitchell, and Sonny and Cher. From 1976 to 2006, he released 10 solo albums—some of them in the contemporary Christian genre. While teamed up with Barry McGuire, he has recorded another five albums between 1995 and 2007. From 2003 to 2004, Mason Proffit reunited and recorded two CDs. Currently, Terry lives and performs regularly in Fresno, California, and still upholds his reputation as one of the country’s greatest acoustic guitarists. Among his career highlights are a Grammy for the cover art of Mason Proffit’s Come and Gone (1973) and a Grammy nomination for the Talbot Brothers’ The Painter, which Billboard hailed as “the acoustic album of the ‘70s decade.”