On to a winner, both at home and away

From Braveheart to Nashville, Tam White�s career is one of contrasts, but, writes Rob Adams, the future has never looked brighter.

Tam White's past is catching up with him - and he's loving every minute of it. At an age when musicians might be expected to mark time and eke out a living from a familiar routine, the Edinburgh-based blues singer and former stone mason has two new projects to get his teeth into, both drawing on connections that he thought were consigned to history.

When he steps onstage in his home town tonight with his new band, the Sermon Organ Trio, White will be taking time off from his other, recently acquired persona, the transatlantic songwriter with a co-writing partner and publishing company in Nashville.

The past couple of years have not been good ones for White.

Following the death of his soulmate, bandleader and general catalyst, the former Bad Company bassist Boz Burrell, White lost his long-time friend and sometime drummer Toto McNaughton and until recently his own health had been giving seasoned White-watchers some cause for concern.

"Boz was a major loss," he says in his trademark amiable growl, "because we were always on the same wavelength. We had the same sense of humour and similar ideas when it came to writing songs together and how they should sound. Plus, with his contacts, talent and energy, he had the wherewithal to bring things to fruition.

"We'd talk about putting a big band together and playing a residency at Ronnie Scott's in London, and the next thing you knew Boz had the players booked, the arrangements written and the dates organised. So I'd been thinking, here I am, a pensioner he's 67 this July, running out of chances when two opportunities came along almost at the same time."

For White, the pleasing thing about both of these projects is that the people involved approached him. With the exception of the "Boz years" of the 1990s, White has always been the one putting bands together, finding them work and assembling another line-up when record deals have crashed and disillusionment has set in. He can, without too much arm- twisting, reel off a litany of hustling nightclub owners in the late 1950s, near misses with the Boston Dexters in the 1960s, hook-ups with music industry legends from B B King to maverick record producer Joe Meek, a rather less fondly remembered brush with cabaret in the 1970s and his rejuvenation with a new Dexters in the 1980s. Recent gigs had found him mostly singing solo with just his acoustic guitar for company, so the idea that the comparatively youthful Sermon Organ Trio wanted him to front them knocked White out.

"I'd done a few gigs with Paul Harrison on piano, when Brian Kellock couldn't do our duo dates, and then Paul phoned to say they had this organ, guitar and drums trio and they'd love to do some of the things I'd done on the old albums - and they wanted to rehearse and do different arrangements," says White, savouring the word "rehearse" particularly. "Just the fact that they wanted to work with this old codger was a fillip for me, but they also wanted to do things properly, be a real band and that's something I've really missed over the past few years."

It was back in the days of the Dexters' second coming that the seeds for White's other project were sown. Having made an album, Live at the BBC, and considered the results good enough to share with the home of the blues, in 1982 White took himself off to Memphis. This episode would merit a chapter to itself in a White autobiography but the postcard home version reads: singing the blues on the Memphis television evening news; wowing the natives in a bar on Beale Street; and being invited to open the annual Memphis in May outdoor barbecue in front of 35,000 people with a Texas blues band.

Hanging out in the ultimate Memphis blues location, the Peabody Hotel, White also thought he was meeting, he relates suitably shamefaced, the legendary Memphis producer Willie Mitchell, midwife to the great Al Green's string of hits. Except that the Will Mitchell he'd bumped into was white.

A computer expert who was hoping to cross over into the music business, this Will Mitchell invited White to spend some time on his ranch, which was, says White, more smallholding than Southfork, in the hills outside Nashville. Ensconced in a log cabin, White used the opportunity to write songs, one of which, sung by country star Lynn Anderson, became the theme to the BBC drama series Wreck on the Highway, in which White also starred. Mitchell was impressed but then, not long after, White returned to Scotland to branch out into TV and film parts, and he and Mitchell lost touch.

Until, enter White on to the screen of Braveheart, playing the chief of the clan MacGregor but sounding unmistakably himself to Mitchell, who had taken his family to the cinema on a whim and caught a re-run. Mitchell, who by this time was producing a Nashville-based cable TV show called Legends and Lyrics, googled White, found his website and re-established contact. He also put White in touch with a co-writer in Ricky Ray Rector, whose credits include writing A Good Day for the Blues for Atlantic Records' singing star Ruth Brown.

The upshot is that, in April, White will fly to Nashville to appear in Legends and Lyrics, a songwriters-in-the-round format whose previous guests include Jimmy Webb and Kris Kristofferson, and to try to find some songwriting magic with Rector.

"I'm already working on ideas and although these days you can co-write over the internet, it's preferable to be in the same room to bounce things off each other," he says. "The idea for the TV show is that I should represent Scotland because so much of country and bluegrass music has its roots back here. I'm not really a country songwriter but labels are just labels - what was Hank Williams, one of the greatest country music legends, if he wasn't a blues singer after all? - and the stuff I'm coming up with works for both genres, I think. I'm not building my hopes up but between the songwriting and appearing on a coast-to-coast television show, we'll see what happens. If nothing else, it'll get me out from under my wife's feet."