Before he played guitar, Shawn Mullins was a drummer. His grandfather, who played upright bass and bass horns professionally in big band, jazz and Dixieland bands, bought him a drum set when he was four years old. “That’s what really got me into it, was starting with something I could beat on,” Mullins explains.

From there, his brother taught him some guitar chords when he was around ten, and then his father bought him his first guitar for Christmas – an axe that lasted him all the way through college. His brother and sister could both play guitar and sing, his mother is also a musician, and his father filled the house with an eclectic collection of soul, folk, pop, and rock records. With a youth spent stewing in this musical bouillabaisse, it was a short step to garage bands in middle and high school, where he played both drums and guitar, as he also did in his high school jazz band. That rich base, seasoned with singing in numerous choral groups and acting in school plays, was the perfect recipe for the music career to come.

Mullins studied voice and majored in music education at North Georgia College in Dahlonega, and started gigging at Beauregard’s Bar and Grill, the off-campus juke joint. He’d soon infiltrated the Atlanta acoustic scene, performing at Eddie’s Attic and the Track Side Tavern, and people began asking for tapes. After graduation, he “owed Uncle Sam a little active duty time” – an Army ROTC scholarship had helped him pay for college – but his commission didn’t slow down his playing. Between training exercises at Fort Benning in West Georgia, he performed everywhere he could, and when his commitment was complete, he hit the road for good.

In 1991, he started his own label, SMG records, and toured behind each new record he released. Seven years later, in 1998, “Lullaby” snagged the attention of an Atlanta radio programmer, who put the song in heavy rotation and championed Shawn’s cause, sending a copy of the album, “Soul’s Core,” to programmers across the country. The attention earned a major-label contract with Columbia Records, who re-released the album. “Lullaby” rose to the top position on the pop charts, the album went platinum in the U.S. and Australia, and Shawn earned a Grammy nomination in 1999 for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “Lullaby.”

Since that ride in the spotlight, he’s returned to the habits that put him there: writing songs, recording albums, and touring behind them, albeit with more name recognition and slightly better road accommodations. He also teamed up with fellow folk rockers Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge to form the supergroup The Thorns in 2002.

Shawn’s latest album, “The 9th Ward Pickin’ Parlor,” was recorded in old friend Mike West’s studio in New Orleans, not long before the recording space was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The record, released in 2006 and featuring “Beautiful Wreck” as its first single, is his sixth full-length studio album.