A Marriage of Classical and Country? : Folk-country singer Debra Anne Suhr and flutist Greg Bishop got together musically (as well as personally) and formed Tuxedo Cowboy--and found that the hybrid collaboration works.

Nobody in Tuxedo Cowboy deliberately set out to reconcile the honky tonk with the recital hall. Instead, the members of this unusual chamber-pop trio arrived at their hybrid of country and classical music by following the tracks of their tears.

Tuxedo Cowboy, which plays Saturday night at the Shade Tree in Laguna Niguel, had its unlikely origins one night in June, 1988, when a folk-country singer named Debra Anne Suhr decided to expand her musical horizons.

Suhr (pronounced sir ) had lived all her life in Montana before coming to Orange County in 1986 with a vague notion of finding a place in the Southern California pop scene. She never had seen a classical music performance, until one night when an ensemble of local musicians came to her church in Newport Beach for a program of sacred music by Bach.

Suhr wept at the beauty of the music. When the concert ended, she decided to thank the musicians who had made her emotions flow. The first tuxedo-clad figure she found in the post-concert milling about was flutist Greg Bishop.

“She came up to me and said, ‘That was so beautiful, it brought tears of joy to my eyes,’ ” Bishop recalled during a recent interview. That opening line began a conversation that went on until 4 a.m., ending back at Suhr’s Balboa Peninsula apartment (“Once she found out I was from Idaho, she figured I was safe,” Bishop said wryly). There, the roles reversed: Suhr sang one of her songs, a tender piece about brokenhearted love, and it was Bishop who was moved to tears.

The two started dating, got engaged and, gradually, became musical partners as well. Suhr, 33, quit her job in a real estate agent’s office and went back to eking out a living as she had in Montana, singing country and folk-pop hits in solo appearances at restaurants and coffeehouses, where she performed under the name Debra Anne.

Bishop, 31, went on with his routine as a professional flutist, earning a living through performances with a variety of community orchestras, theatrical productions, wedding ensembles and the like. About a year ago, as they began to discover more unity than disparity in their practice collaborations, the duo decided to find a third player to broaden the sound.

Enter Steve Velez, whom Bishop knew from the local classical music circuit. Bishop introduced the cellist to Suhr’s music by playing him a tape of her songs performed solo.

“Oh, yes, I cried,” recalled Velez, a tall, deep-voiced man of 29, as he sat in the living room of Suhr and Bishop’s modest house in Costa Mesa. “I still cry.”

In fact, Tuxedo Cowboy is capable of a loveliness that can make it hard to hold back tears. In her songwriting, Suhr has a knack for probing the deep, psychological barriers that must be overcome for love to take hold and last. She sets these closely observed, nakedly emotional stories to melodies that are pretty and sweet, but never cloyingly so.

Then Velez and Bishop do their part: the cello mourns quietly or lends broad, softly comforting caresses; the flute pipes beautiful airs that divide the music’s intimate hush. The sheer loveliness makes it work, as Suhr’s folk and country strains merge with the classical instrumentation without sounding mannered or studied.

At first, Bishop said, Suhr “was intimidated with all my education.” Bishop, one of five brothers who are all professional musicians, had earned a master’s degree in flute performance from the University of Wisconsin before moving to Los Angeles to pursue free-lance work. Velez, who grew up in Westminster, had studied cello from the age of 13, and is currently working on his music degree.

Suhr, meanwhile, grew up as a truck driver’s daughter in the oil-boom town of Glendive, in the Badlands of Montana. She was a self-taught singer and guitarist who tried to write deep, serious songs and stories to escape from the stereotype that comes with being the head cheerleader at a small-town high school--which is what Suhr was.

“These guys talk to each other” in musical terminology, Suhr said in a sweet, animated voice that seems to have lost none of its folksiness after 3 1/2 years in Orange County. But when she wants to communicate how she thinks the music should sound, “I say things like ‘The emotional quality here is very sad, but not pathetic.’ I don’t talk it. I just make a lot of motions. It’s fun.”

Bishop grew up enjoying such ‘70s progressive rock bands as Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, along with the classics. He said that he occasionally would listen to a country song on the radio as he twiddled back and forth between classical stations.

Velez said that the Beatles and Beethoven were his twin towers of musical influence as a youngster. The closest he came to country culture was a modeling assignment years ago in which he lent his handsome visage and athletic frame to a fashion show featuring Western garb. When the classic Tammy Wynette song, “Stand By Your Man,” came up in conversation, Velez drew a blank.

Among most classical musicians, Bishop said, “country music was just for one thing only--drinking and dancing. I had that same attitude.”

“He was a classical snob,” Suhr added in a playful voice, turning her head and shielding her mouth as if delivering an out-of-earshot aside. Bishop and Velez “had prejudices against this, but we worked them out.”

Tuxedo Cowboy’s merger of country and classical music isn’t unique. Lyle Lovett has used small string ensembles as backup for some songs, and Neil Young’s debut solo album included a couple of countrified classical string interludes. But no well-known pop group comes to mind that bases all of its music on a merger of classical and folk-country elements.

Consequently, Tuxedo Cowboy could face a hard time attracting interest from record companies, which like to feed their marketing machinery with easily labeled, demographically targeted packages.

“I’m not certain you can be a big name and not put yourself in one box that says ‘country,’ ” Suhr said. The country music industry, she said, may balk at the band’s approach: “They’ll think, ‘How can you have classical (elements) and not take out all the country?’ But if they say, ‘Narrow your market down a bit,’ I don’t believe in that. Our vision is all across the board. I envision Tuxedo Cowboy as a beautiful box. On (the different sides) it says ‘folk’ and ‘country’ and ‘classical’ and ‘new acoustic.’ In any performance, you are going to get a little of each.”

Tuxedo Cowboy’s members feel encouraged by recent developments in the music business. Bishop noted that intimate folk and country-tinged music has found a spot on radio in the soft-pop “Wave” format. And country and pop formats both jumped on Kathy Mattea’s “Where’ve You Been?” which last week was voted country song of the year by the Academy of Country Music. With acoustic piano, acoustic guitar and a bowed, classical-style upright bass, the ballad’s quiet, intimate arrangement is similar to the Tuxedo Cowboy approach.

For now, Tuxedo Cowboy’s plan calls for stepping up live performances from a sporadic once a month--usually at private functions--to weekly concerts in clubs aimed at winning it a steady local following.

If an unconventional combination of styles were all the band could offer, it might qualify as a mildly interesting gimmick act. But Tuxedo Cowboy’s striking songs make it far more than a genre-jumping oddity.

The trio’s album-length demo tape ranges from the lovely, psychologically aware romanticism of songs like “Woman of the Heart” and “He Loved Her Then,” to the social realism of “I Am Homeless.”

Sung from the viewpoint of an embittered homeless woman, “I Am Homeless” is a confrontational, unsentimentalized handling of a subject that too often receives smarmy treatment from singers who seem less intent on doing their job--writing a vivid song--than on boosting their egos by broadcasting their sympathy for the less fortunate.

Suhr said the song, like most of what she writes, was written without deliberate planning or conscious consideration. She shocked herself with another song, “Black Haired Beauty,” a taut, closely observed portrait of a woman consumed by nightmarish fears in the aftermath of a rape.

“It came completely out of the blue. There was no sense of reality in that,” Suhr said. “I don’t do anything in my head in writing. It’s all out of my heart and my gut. These chords started coming out of the guitar, and it was really scaring me, because I’d never written anything like that. The word ‘rape’ came onto my tongue. I put down my guitar and did a couple of circles around the room and said, ‘I’m not going to write about that.’ ”

Only after talking to friends, who said the song could be useful for women to hear, did Suhr finish it, using the word “violation” in the climactic line, because “rape” was still too fearsome a word for her to utter.

“I think my real gift is the heart,” she said. “Go right for the jugular and stay with the honesty, and you’ll find your audience.”

Tuxedo Cowboy and George Lawton play Saturday night at 8 at the Shade Tree, 28062D Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. Tickets: $8. Information: (714) 364-5270. On Friday night, No Doubt, Twisto Frumpkin and the Cambridge Hypers will play a benefit for UC Irvine radio station KUCI. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. in the Crystal Cove Auditorium on the UC Irvine campus. Tickets: $8. Information: (714) 856-6868.