John Anderson Knows Country --Inside and Out

“We’ll be swingin,’ ” John Anderson twanged during the chorus of a blithely rocking hit in 1982 that helped secure his long tenure in country music.

Little did Anderson know how accurate “Swingin’ ” would be as a predictor of his career. If you made a graph of his sales progress over the years, the lines would swing indeed, with a couple of rises and plunges steep enough to delight a roller-coaster buff but potentially nerve-racking for anyone riding not for thrills but for keeps.

Anderson’s quality as a singer has never flagged. He is unrivaled as the most distinctive, authentically folksy and rural-sounding male country singer of his generation. His voice courses through a song like a woodland stream--thick and lazily winding when the seasons are calm, but with urgent momentum when storm waters surge.

His fortunes rose through the late ‘70s, when his singles began to make the charts, crested in the early ‘80s, then plummeted after 1986. In 1992, the album “Seminole Wind” blew him back to the top, selling more than 2 million copies and spawning four radio hits.

Among them were the ballad “Straight Tequila Night,” a sympathetic portrait of a lovelorn woman, and his own composition, “Seminole Wind,” an anthem of environmental warning whose epic sweep and dark grandeur qualify it for serious consideration as mainstream country’s artistic high-water mark for the decade so far.

But the swingin’ has resumed for Anderson (who plays Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana). Three subsequent albums have sold successively fewer copies. The current “Paradise”--despite solid material and reliably distinctive vocals that have netted it good reviews--is struggling with 33,000 copies sold since its January release, according to the SoundScan monitoring service.

What’s more, Anderson has crossed the line of death for a ‘90s country artist: In a market geared lately to selling what is young, shiny and disposable, he has had the bad judgment to turn 40 (and now 41).

Thursday, calling from country music’s annual Fan Fair in Nashville, a meet-and-greet affair where he had just spent 2 1/2 hours giving autographs, Anderson spoke in a rich, deep drawl, chuckled readily and didn’t sound downhearted at all about his chart fortunes’ current ebb.

“When I was trying to get into country music, they wouldn’t take a serious look at you until you were 40,” said Anderson, who was just 17 when he arrived in Nashville from his hometown of Apopka, Fla. (He remembers that, as he began scoring hits at age 24, people always marveled when they discovered that the dusty, lived-in voice on the records belonged to someone so young.)

“Now that’s all changed. If a person is going to have a long career now, he’d better get in when he’s 6 or 7. I’ve already had a longer career than most of them, bless their hearts, are [going to have].”

He said that although his current downward swing wasn’t inevitable--he thinks better timing and sales tactics for his releases since “Seminole Wind” could have kept him on a steadier keel--he was prepared for a turnaround, having gone through it all in the ‘80s.

This time, he said, it’s much easier.

“At that point [in the ‘80s], I wasn’t expecting it to taper off. This time around, I knew it would some day, and [that] when it started, I wasn’t going to let it bother me. I’m just trying to walk the wire and stay in the game.

“I love to play; performing to me is first and foremost. We still have a lot of fans, and that’s what I do.”

Being in a commercial trough at the start of the ‘90s may have actually helped Anderson realize the artistic triumph of “Seminole Wind.”

“It wasn’t [a song] that came quick,” he said. “I worked on it a long time [after having] the original idea. It was something I kept going back to and trying to make better. At that point, it wasn’t like we were writing a song for any particular reason other than to write a good song. Our record label deals were at a standstill.

“When I first started writing ‘Seminole Wind,’ it didn’t strike me as being very commercial because of the environmental [theme]. By the time I finished it and played it to people, they were saying, ‘That’s a good song.’ ”

Now, Anderson--an outdoorsman who grew up hunting and fishing--has become, if not exactly the Peter Gabriel of Nashville, then at least somebody other artists identify with socially conscious artistry.

When Merle Haggard came up with “Winds of Change,” an environmental-warning song that appears on his new “1996” album, he invited Anderson to be his duet partner.

“He called and said he’d found a good song and really thought I was the man to do the part,” Anderson said. “I don’t recall ever being more flattered and proud to do something.”

(Anderson has an illustrious duet partner on his new album too: Levon Helm of the Band joins him for “The Band Plays On,” a song about resilience in the face of defeat. Helm also has been a frequent guest at Anderson’s shows.)

Anderson continues the environmental theme on his new album with “Long Hard Lesson Learned,” which takes a tense, serious approach. But the album has plenty of fun-loving material, and its other socially minded song, a knock against racism called “30,000 Feet,” sounds like a jaunty, country-shuffle rewrite of the Julie Gold/Bette Midler 1991 Grammy winner, “From a Distance.”

Both songs share the thematic device of looking at the planet from the atmosphere’s upper reaches, wondering how what looks so peaceful and unified from long range can turn so petty and nasty up close.

“Actually, I’ve never heard ‘From a Distance,’ ” Anderson said before breaking into a lusty laugh over the mere thought that he might watch a Grammy telecast. “That can tell you how wrapped up we get in our own thing.”

* John Anderson plays Monday at 7 and 10 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. $39.50. (714) 549-1512.