T. Graham Brown: A Natural at Soul, R

As record producer Sam Phillips knew when he signed a Mississippi boy named Elvis to his Sun Records label 36 years ago, the next best thing to owning a key to Fort Knox is having a white singer who has an authoritative way with black vocal styles.

Phillips’ golden rule still holds true. The continuing success of singers such as Huey Lewis, Steve Winwood and Michael Bolton (who won a Grammy last week for best male pop vocal) shows that the white-soul style hasn’t gone out of vogue with the mainstream pop audience.

What makes T. Graham Brown an anomaly is that he is making a career out of singing white-soul to a country audience--a market more attuned to a George Jones twang than to an Otis Redding rasp. And Brown, a much stronger singer and a far more natural soul-R&B; interpreter than either Bolton or Lewis, does a mighty fine Otis Redding.

What is a raw, husky-sounding R&B; singer doing in Nashville, competing with all those twangy, clear-voiced singers for airplay on country radio?

Brown, who plays tonight at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, says the answer has less to do with musical style than with the outlook on the world he got growing up until his mid-teens in Arabi, Ga., a farming hamlet of 375 people steeped in the ways of the rural South.

By 1982, Brown knew he had to get out of Georgia, where he had logged almost 10 years as a regional performer singing hard country and R&B.; Speaking over the phone recently from a tour stop in Salt Lake City, Brown recalled how he sought career advice from Randall Bramblett, a member of the Southern-rock band, Sea Level.

“He was the only guy I knew that had a real record deal and had albums out,” Brown said in his easygoing drawl. “He told me I needed to get out of Athens, Ga., and move to New York or Los Angeles or Nashville. I was just too scared to move to Los Angeles or New York. I was brought up in a culture that didn’t trust L.A. and didn’t trust New York. I was 27 and I’d never been west of the Mississippi River. I’d never been to New York. I’d been to Nashville a couple of times for a day or two. There were a lot of guys there from Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee that had the same kind of accent I had, and could relate to the same things I could relate to. I felt I’d be able to fit in well.”

Brown says he still runs into some resistance from hard-core country partisans who don’t think that Hank swould have done it the Otis Redding way, or that any of Hank’s Nashville heirs should, either.

“A guy asked me, ‘What in the hell are you doing putting out soul records for country radio? How do you have the audacity to do that?’ There is an element out there that would much prefer that I wear cowboy boots and a cowboy hat,” said Brown, who favors loud sport jackets for stage wear. “I’ll be the first to admit it’s not traditional country, and I never claimed it was. Luckily, country radio picked up on it.”

Since his debut in 1985, Brown has scored three No. 1 hits on Billboard’s country charts. Much of his music has seemed like an effort to find a mid-point between his deep soul roots and a more polished pop-country ballad sound.

With his upcoming fourth album, “Bumper to Bumper,” Brown has split the difference between country radio’s conventions and his own R&B; leanings. The first half of the album, due out in April, is pleasant but unremarkable country-pop balladry. The second half, kicking off with a reverent remake of Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now),” is a slice of pure joy for listeners who love the old Memphis R&B; sound of Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, full of swaggering, massed horns and satisfying soul singing.

For Brown, 35, there never was a schism between country and soul. As a boy, “I’d listen to the radio, WBAM, ‘The Big BAM’ out of Montgomery, Ala.,” he recalled. “There wasn’t any country radio. It didn’t have any label like that. You might hear Johnny Cash, and the next song would be Wilson Pickett.”

In those days, Brown was more interested in swinging a bat than singing soul music. A star outfielder and pitcher in high school, he enrolled at the University of Georgia with his heart set on the big leagues. But the baseball coach benched him, and a friend told him that the Holiday Inn across from the campus was looking for a singer who could fill its lounge.

Brown and a guitar-playing partner formed a duo that was soon packing the lounge and earning Brown $600 a week singing R&B; oldies for an audience of fraternity and sorority members. At 19, Brown said, he could afford his own house and a Corvette. Then, in 1975, he saw a television documentary about David Allan Coe, the ex-convict singer-songwriter who was one of the leaders of the mid-’70s “Outlaw” movement in country music.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” Brown recalled. “I had real short hair and wore button-down, starched shirts and khaki pants. I looked like a typical fraternity guy. I saw David Allan Coe and he was totally wild, and I said, ‘I want to be this guy.’ ”

Brown grew his hair, got a tattoo, and started a hard-country band called Reo Diamond. “I dropped out of college. I went totally the opposite of what I’d been--druggin’ , drinkin’ , fightin’ --everything. Just totally wild.”

Brown started writing his own songs and kept his band on the road in the Southeast for several years. Then the Outlaw phase ended; the slicker Urban Cowboy movement set in, and Reo Diamond stopped making money. Brown went back to singing soul music in a band called Rack of Spam, playing the same Athens bar circuit that was giving rise in the early 1980s to a fertile alternative-rock scene led by R.E.M.

Brown said he went to high school in Athens at the same time as two future members of the B-52’s, the irreverent new-wave rock band that first put Athens on the alternative rock map in the late 1970s (the B-52’s are enjoying a resurgence with a million-selling album, “Cosmic Thing” that is in the Billboard Top 10).

“In high school, I didn’t like them, and they didn’t like me,” Brown said. “I never hung out with ‘em. It was a cliquish deal. They were all art students, and they didn’t know how to play or sing. I was thinking at the time, ‘My God, how can these people be serious?’ I was missing the whole point, I guess. I thought they were screwing around and giving music a bad name. I finally got hip to the whole thing, but I was just raised in a whole different atmosphere, to respect tradition and all that stuff, and these guys didn’t respect tradition at all. As a kid, I came from a whole different planet than they did.”

“I didn’t understand it, but they were probably more right than I was. They were willing to go to New York for what they wanted, and I was too chicken to go to New York. It took me nine years to get up the nerve to be serious enough about it to leave home and friends.”

When Brown did get up the nerve, he headed to Nashville with his wife, Sheila. She had just earned a master’s degree in nutrition and dairy science from the University of Georgia, but she gave up her academic field to support her husband’s musical ambitions. Brown said his wife worked in a department store by day and as a waitress by night.

“I was singing demos (recordings that music publishers use to ‘demonstrate’ a song they hope a given artist or producer will use on an album) at $20 a pop. I made $900 the first year I was in Nashville.” But Brown’s voice got around on those demos, and doors began to open for him--opportunities to write songs, sing jingles (something he still does for Taco Bell, among others) and, ultimately, to record for Capitol Records.

“We’re doin’ real good,” said Brown, who has a 7-month-old son named Acme. “We’ve got a house (in Nashville) with a swimming pool and a new Lincoln, which is the first new car we ever had.”

Brown still keeps the 1959 Ford station wagon that brought him and his wife to Nashville. “I’ll always have that,” he said. “It was a good luck charm.”

T. Graham Brown plays tonight at 7 and 10 at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $19. Information: (714) 549-1512.