Carter Beauford has been playing drums since his childhood. His father played trumpet in a jazz band and it seemed natural for Carter to play music. After playing the drums in college, Carter abandoned his first love for his second love, teaching history.
          But he soon went back to music. He signed on with a fusion band called Secrets, which lasted from 1984 to 1990. The band amassed a huge following on theVirginia jazz circuit, including one South African expatriate named Dave Matthews, who was veryfervent in his support of the band. After the band dissolved, Carter went to California to try out for the Arsenio Hall Show. When he failed to and the spot, Carter came back to the east coast and
landed a job on pianist Ramsey Lewis's BET jazz show, "Bet on Jazz". 
          In January of 1991, Carter moved back to Charlottesville, playing random gigs and driving into Washington to tape the BET show.When Matthews heard Carter was back in Virginia, he
decided to approach him about making the demo tape he had been dreaming about. Carter joined the band known as the "Dave Matthews Band".

      "It started out as a three-piece thing with Dave, and Leroy, our saxophone player working on some of Dave's songs. He only had four songs at the time. And we were working on them trying to
develop something out of them. To put them in a position where Dave could get the full view of what his tunes were going to sound like. And it didn't work out with the three of us. We managed to get a few things happenin'… you know... with the songs, but we needed a bass player. That was the bottom line. So, we ended up getting Stephon, who's our bassist now. He was like fifteen or sixteen at the time. We got him… yanked him out of high-school."

                                   -Beauford on the beginning of Dave Matthew Band