Taylor Franklin McBaine was born in a log cabin north of Columbia, Boone County February 11, 1910 and passed away May 18, 1994 at the age of 84. As a young man McBaine was a truck driver, farmer, coal miner, day laborer and shoe factory lasting machine operator until becoming an electrician at the University of Missouri where he worked from 1938 until his retirement in 1973. He was a Methodist and Freemason. A contest champion and fiddle teacher, he was a friend and mentor to countless younger musicians. Taylor was featured at festivals from Massachusetts to California, many of them in performances with his good friends Cathy Barton and Dave Para. McBaine was a familiar volunteer at music parties held at retirement homes and hospitals in central Missouri.

As a child, Taylor McBaine learned the traditional music and dancing of our region in the Browns Station community. He learned to play fiddle around 1918 from his father Henry Lee McBaine and his uncle Richard McBaine. As a teenager in the 1920s, McBaine began playing in public at church and school house pie suppers with guitarist Alfred Rice, and McBaine remembered that it was Rice (himself a fiddler) who taught him how to use the violin bow to best advantage. As a young man of 15, McBaine had a band that played for dances in local halls.

He also learned the central Missouri repertory from Columbia area fiddlers like “The Fiddling Sheriff” George Morris and the legendary champion Daniel Boone Jones. Later on he learned tunes from commercial recordings of fiddlers like Howdy Forrester and Tommy Jackson. Like many central and north Missouri fiddlers McBaine also played guitar and some backup piano. He was basically an “ear musician,” but when he wanted to he could figure out tunes from books like the familiar “Cole’s” One Thousand Fiddle Tunes--sometimes with the help of a piano player like his sister Jemima Perkins.

Taylor McBaine was a master in the Missouri Folk Arts Program's Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program in 1985, 1992, and 1994.