WHEN T.C. Jones was writing folk songs in his Denman lounge room he never expected he'd one day be performing these tunes in front of an audience.
In fact, he never thought anyone would hear them.
As a 37-year-old father-of-two working in the coal mines and living in the western corner of the Hunter Valley, he was hardly on the radar of the music scene.
"I just didn't think it would eventuate to anything I suppose," Jones says of his songs.
"I live out in a little town like Denman, you never think you're gonna get heard beyond your mate's house."
But a fortunate sequence of events changed all that for Timothy Charles Jones.
At the 2019 Dashville Skyline music festival at Lower Belford, Jones happened to camp next to Sydney woman Clare Fitzgerald. The pair hit it off and subsequently became a couple.
"It was pure chance," Jones says. "Absolute luck. Right place, right time."
Fitzgerald was blown away by her new boyfriend's songs and recommended him to her friends, Dave Forrester and Areatha Bryant, who happened to run alt-country label Stanley Records and Mother Hen Touring respectively.
Forrester was equally impressed and promptly signed Jones to Stanley Records.
A year ago Forrester told the Newcastle Herald of Jones, saying, "He's a singer-songwriter that nobody has heard of, but he's gonna be amazing and I'm really looking forward to working with him, seeing if we can put him in front of some bigger audiences."
That mission to put Jones in front of bigger audiences has begun. Last weekend Jones finished his first tour, playing in the Stanley Records Travelling Medicine Show with Newcastle-raised artists Katie Brianna and Looch Lewis & The Press Gangsters and this week it was announced he'll make his debut at Dashville Skyline in spring.
"It's come full circle, it's where it all began without us knowing it," Jones says of playing Skyline.
"It really does mean a lot to be put on that bill because I love that festival, I love that place. There's something about that Dashville property that makes you feel better about everything.
"It makes all your troubles melt away when you're in that place. It's a beautiful part of the world and they're beautiful people who run it."
Earlier this month Jones released his debut EP, Roadmap Across A State Of Blue.
The six-track EP was recorded in the former Quorrobolong tractor shed home of singer-songwriter Melody Pool and her partner Christopher Dale, and intimately captures Jones' emotive Australian-bush vocal and acoustic guitar with minimal instrumentation.
It provides a heightened atmosphere for Jones' poetic story-telling to flourish.
"It's been just an outlet for dealing with whatever I'm going through in life," Jones says. "They've become a personal diary or something, which I find easier to put into songs.
"There were some things I thought I'd never wanna share, but people seem to get something out of them."
Statues In The Rose Garden tells a fictional story of man unable to follow the love of his life as he's frozen to one place and Cuttin' Wood finds a man dealing with a painful breakup by keeping his hands active.
Others dwell on something far darker, like Barfly, where Jones sings: Some people raise the question, 'man what's he running from?'/ And I decline to answer in case I answer wrong/ It's just holding up the bar all night is how I keep it gone.
"A lot of it is directly from my life experience," Jones says. "Things that have happened to myself and my family.
"The only way for me to process things sometimes is to put them into a song."
Music is hardly a new outlet for Jones.
He grew up in Scone and played guitar from 11 and went on to perform in school rock bands. After school he spent time in a metal band but found his real calling in the alternative-country and folk of US artists like Jason Isbell and John Moreland.
But while Jones enjoys American alt-country, he had no designs to imitate it. Jones' vocal resembles Redgum's John Schumann and is soaked in the Australian rural working-class.
"That's deliberate," he says. "I've never been to America, I was born and raised in Australia.
"I saw a lack of - not to say there isn't good artists out there, there's so many great musicians doing great music - but as far as the sound I heard in my head, there wasn't an Australian version.
"There's plenty of Americanised stuff, but I wanted to sing about where I'm from and the places I've been, as I feel it's more authentic for me.
"I don't mind if other people wanna sing about America, but for me, I find it easier to convey in the lyrics if I know the place or been there and experienced it."
Jones has no plans to toss in his mining day job any time soon, but music is becoming a bigger priority.
"It's definitely something I wanna keep doing because I've got plenty more songs in the bank," he says.
"I'd eventually like to get a band together and do a full-length record and tour on that."
T.C. Jones plays the Grand Junction Hotel in Maitland on July 2 and Dashville Skyline on September 28 to October 1.
