Thomas is passionate about music and started playing the guitar when he was only 8 years old. He was taught to play the guitar by Julius Wright, a cousin of the famed singer Betty Wright of Miami, Florida. He has played for and sung with such artists as Dorothy Norwood, the Gospel Keynotes of Tyler Texas, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Rance Allen, Willie Neil Johnson, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Mississippi, the late Timothy Wright of NY, and the late Robert Blair of the Fantastic Violinaires of Detroit, Michigan. He has also sung with The Fantastic Violinaires as their lead tenor.
   Thomas Rhyant, Jr. has over 50 years’ experience performing in concerts, churches, and special events across the United States. He has also traveled to Jamaica, The Bahamas, Paris, Rome, Italy where he had Papal with the Pope at Vatican City, and most recently to Brussels, Amsterdam, and Germany.
   Mr. Rhyant has released a few of his own personally arranged CD’s entitled, New Thing, At My Door, The Legends Remembered, and Remembering Sam Cooke (a tribute to the legend). He is a famed gospel singer and musical troubadour, using music to tell stories of those who came before him. As a young boy in Florida, Thomas Rhyant use to slip out of the house late at night to go sit in his Daddy’s Cadillac and listen to AM frequencies that you couldn’t pick up during the day. He heard voices coming from the Bahamas, Chicago, New York... and his dream was to one day see those places. His music that would take him there. 
   Rhyant was raised on quartet gospel music. His father was an aspiring singer who was frustrated with the difficulties of trying to keep a group together. Eventually, he decided to build one the organic way, fathering four sons who became a family gospel quartet known as The Rhyant Brothers. All four sons sang and played an instrument, but Thomas—the oldest, and the one with a razor sharp musical memory—was elected to be the guitarist.
   The first time he heard Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers—on his dad’s 8-track cassette player—his own musical aspirations snapped into focus. The sound, the range, and the versatility of Cooke’s voice completely gripped Rhyant. With Sam Cooke’s style as a guide, Rhyant set about pursuing those late night Cadillac dreams. He began working to emulate Cooke’s style, and found his efforts paying off. He has traveled all over the United States and abroad, singing and playing his guitar. He became part of The Violinaires, the legendary group with whom Wilson Pickett cut his teeth before becoming an R&B superstar. The group’s drummer was the son of R.H. Harris – Sam Cooke’s mentor and teacher, and one of the most important figures in the history of gospel music.  Through the Violinaires Rhyant met many of his musical heroes, and spent hours listening and soaking up the history of their lives and music. 
With his tasteful guitar style and stunningly wide-ranging voice and enigmatic backing band, Rhyant is well on his way to fulfilling his youthful dream of seeing the world. But now he realizes that the traveling is only a byproduct of his real calling—making people happy by sharing the music he loves, and thereby keeping its history of soul music alive.