Bobby Kimball

Robert Troy Kimball (born March 29, 1947) is an American retired singer and musician, best known as the original frontman of the rock band Toto from 1977 to 1984 and again from 1998 to 2008. He has also performed as a solo artist and session singer.

Kimball was raised in Vinton, Louisiana, but born in nearby Orange, Texas, as Vinton did not have a hospital. He started singing as a child, dabbling on vocals and playing piano and acoustic guitar in a musical household throughout his youth, mostly covering and performing 1950s and 1960s R&B hits, 1800s traditional old-time music, and rare local swamp pop and Cajun folk songs typical of Louisiana.

His parents were extremely supportive of his musical talents, devoting themselves to his desire to become a full-time professional musician as an adult. He is of English, German, Irish, and Cajun French ancestry. He graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1969.

Throughout the 1970s, Kimball performed as the vocalist in various New Orleans-area bands, including the Levee Band, which became Louisiana's LeRoux after Kimball left.

In 1974, Kimball moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles, California, to pursue a full-time music career. In California, he joined three members of Three Dog Night, Floyd Sneed, Joe Schermie, and Michael Allsup, to form a band called S.S. Fools. They released one album on CBS Records, which was considered a commercial failure, causing the band to be dropped from their label and to split up within a year and a half. In 1976, David Paich and Jeff Porcaro asked Kimball to join them with three other session musicians, who would eventually form Toto. He submitted a self-penned audition song for the band, "You Are the Flower", which he had written for his daughter and was later included on Toto's debut album. Paich and Porcaro were impressed by Kimball's bluesy vocal style and offered him the job of vocalist and songwriter. The pair liked Kimball's ability to sing in an R&B style and to fuse it with hard rock and jazz, which was characteristic and attributed to his Louisiana origins.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.