It was cowboy boots instead of Wallabees when Rob Baird was in high school.

"My nickname was 'Boots,'" he said.

Baird, 21, a country music singer with one CD, Past Tomorrow, under his Western belt, still wears cowboy boots. "They're comfortable. I don't have any dress shoes except dress boots."

He became a country-music fan in fifth grade, when a buddy burned him a Hank Williams Jr. CD.

A defensive lineman on the football team at Memphis University School, Baird "was really into music and singing to myself when I was walking down the hall."

During summers, he worked at a ranch in Wyoming. "We'd go on pack trips and all kinds of things like that. We'd have nights around the campfire and everybody would play 'till 1, 2 in the morning. That's when I started realizing that I had the ability to play and sing for people."

His football career ended in his senior year. "I got kicked in the head by a horse the last year that I was working in Wyoming."

He enrolled at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. "They had a ranch management program, which I'm no longer part of. It's quite grueling and not really what I wanted to do. It's hot outside."

But he got hooked on Texas country music. "It's a little bit less poppy. More rock."

His first gig was singing covers at a Texas night spot called The Aardvark. "I played alone with a bass player and made almost a grand. I was like, 'OK. It's a month's salary, maybe, at a ranch.'"

He put a band together and recorded their CD in 2006. "That CD was kind of instrumental in getting us out to the TCU crowd. (It) got on iTunes and made us look really good."

But, he said, "I don't think I became a writer until after that CD, but the experience helped."

His new songs are "slowly maturing."

One of them, "Could Have Been My Baby," is "a good way to say to some girls that pissed me off: 'It could have worked out, but it didn't.'

"I think the coolest thing that happened to us in Fort Worth was we won the (Fort Worth Weekly's) Alt Country Band of the Year. We beat people we grew up listening to."

When he's not playing music, Baird likes to cook. "I probably cook about five days a week. I'll go buy a duck, braise the duck in the afternoon, drink some beers and have a bunch of girls and guys over. It's therapy for me just to sit in the kitchen for three or four hours."

Baird now is majoring in entrepreneurial management. "I would like to stay in Texas. Fort Worth suits me well. Just depends on where things go -- basically, if the music scene continues to work out. If it doesn't -- I just don't want to end up broke, divorced, on drugs and 40."

-- Michael Donahue; 529-2797

For the full version of this story and to hear music by this week's performer and view more pictures, go to gomemphis.com and click on music.

Rob Baird at 7 tonight at The New Daisy, 330 Beale. Cover: $10.