The latest in that lineage of gifted singers and songwriters who set foot in Muscle Shoals is named John Paul White. Unlike most of the artists who came before him, John Paul didn't have to travel very far. He was born, and still lives, in Muscle Shoals.

So you would think that the distinctive soul-meets-country sound that permeates the records made in his hometown was part of his growing up…that from the time he was a child, walking in the streets where Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Bob Seger, Wilson Pickett, The Rolling Stones all came to visit and soak up the musical influences, he couldn’t help but be aware of the town's legacy.

Not so. John Paul says that while he was growing up, he was more likely to hear his mom's Andy Williams and Perry Como records. And his dad, who had been a die-hard country music fan, shut off the radio during the urban cowboy period and continued to listen exclusively to his George Jones and Don Williams LPs. When his family drove through town, and they passed by Fame Studios, the landmark was pointed out to him as the building where The Osmonds had recorded "One Bad Apple."

This lack of early education notwithstanding, it seemed as though John Paul was on a path to Fame, in a more roundabout way.

It started as he and a group of friends were preparing for a talent contest. The make-shift band was going to lip-sync the AC/DC track "Back In Black." They told John Paul, who couldn’t play an instrument that he could be the air-bassist. As the band was goofing around, John Paul stepped up to the microphone and began singing, accapella, "Stand By Me" (the song had recently become a hit again thanks to the film of the same name). The drummer said, "You can really sing."

"From that point on," John Paul says, “nothing else mattered in my life."

Some of his classmates from the AC/DC experiment formed a band, called Abberation, and they were booked to play a school assembly. By this point, John Paul was the lead singer, and he became a school hero when he dedicated their version of Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" to a particularly disliked female geometry teacher.

"I was David Lee Roth. You couldn't have told me any different."

But the 16-year old would-be David Lee was stuck in Alabama, playing bars. "We played whatever the ladies wanted to hear," he says, and that’s where John Paul first connected with the brand of soul and (mostly southern) rock that was in his geographical DNA. Since it wasn't likely that some A&R guy from a major label was going to walk into a bar in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee to offer them a record deal, John Paul decided to forgo his musical aspirations, temporarily, and enrolled at the University of North Alabama, in Florence.

Through someone at the university, John Paul met a local songwriter named Walt Aldridge, who had had success in the country market (writing songs for Earl Thomas Conley and Ronnie Milsap, among others) and was starting a joint-venture publishing company with EMI Publishing. An audition for Aldridge was arranged, and because John Paul didn’t want to sing any cover songs (“just so he wouldn't compare me to any other versions"), he quickly wrote three original songs, "the first real songs I ever wrote."

Aldridge loved one of the three, and brought it to EMI Publishing, who also loved it. After John Paul wrote some more songs, he was signed to a publishing deal on New Year's Day 1999.

For a while, he drove back and forth between Muscle Shoals and Nashville, begging people to co-write with him, trying to write "songs for the radio." and not getting anywhere. He was going to give it up. He was newly married, frustrated with the progress of his writing career, and he started taking computer programming classes. But he still had some publishing money to do demos, so he decided to cut some songs, just for himself.

"I stopped asking myself, 'Would an artist want to say this?' I didn't write with Tim McGraw or Wynonna in mind. I became selfish. I wanted to write the best songs I could write, and kept digging deeper, getting darker, figuring it out."

At the beginning of 2005, John Paul gathered together musicians he knew from doing demos, and they recorded four songs. Immediately, he knew that this was his calling card. "I knew I was ready. I’d never been more confident. I thought, 'now's the time'."

His publishers at EMI Nashville agreed. As soon as they heard the new material, which leaned much more in a rock direction, they sent it to their New York office, and according to John Paul, EMI NY "jumped in with both feet." By the summer of '05, John Paul was in Manhattan, meeting with A&R people from major labels, playing for them in their offices, showcasing at a club downtown. The interest on the east coast was followed by a trip to Los Angeles to meet with other record companies. "I made it clear to everyone I met with that this was how my record was going to sound. This was the blueprint for the album." The music he was now making was personal, soulful… sometimes dark, but also romantic and emotionally accessible.

On John Paul's trip to LA, he played one song for the President of Capitol Records, who committed on the spot to signing him. This fall, John Paul will take the short – but long – journey over to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals to record his debut Capitol album.

Like most artists of the 21st century, John Paul White can be found on MySpace. But where most artists have biographical information, John Paul has posted a poem, written by Charles Bukowski. It says, in part:

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too clever. I only let him out at night sometimes
when everyone’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little in there,
I haven’t quite let him die

www.johnpaulwhite.com