Culture : For Some Down-Home Sounds, Just Head South for . . . Brazil? : American country music is catching on. One reason: A cowboy-style, home-grown music called ‘sertaneja.’

Sounded like a tall tale from y’all know where. Lino Meira was claiming there are 20, maybe 30 country music bands in these parts.

American country music? Yup. Twenty? More, Meira reckoned. Brazilian outfits with names like Silver Dollar Company, Cowboys, American Pie, The Ugly and the Bad, American Pay Cowboys.

They play at a whole bunch of Sao Paulo night spots. Like the Show Days Saloon, where Meira is manager. Tuesday night is Country Night at the Show Days.

“I get about 100 phone calls a week asking about Country Night,” he said. “There’s a lot of demand. So sometimes I also bring in country bands on Friday nights to please the clients.”

This ain’t Nashville yet. But country music is catching on in South America’s biggest city.

The Show Days is on the third level of Eldorado Shopping, a slick mall deep in the heart of this metropolis of 17 million people. Meira said he has been bringing in country bands for three years and the crowds are “marvelous.”

Many of those who come to listen and dance are young people whose families own farms and ranches in Sao Paulo state’s agriculturally rich interior. A lot of them wear cowboy hats and boots.

Other clients are city people, like Meira, who somehow got hooked on the country sound.

“Country music, what it does, it gets into a person’s blood,” Meira said. “It gets a person in the spirit for drinking, dancing. It makes a person uninhibited.”

The uninhibited, simple rhythms and melodies of country music have a lot in common with Brazil’s musica sertaneja --Portuguese for country music. The growing popularity of musica sertaneja probably helped open the way for American country music’s penetration here, experts in the two genres agree.

In Sao Paulo, for example, a large portion of the population is rural in origin, the first or second generation in the city.

“Even though they are living in the city, listening to other kinds of music, they are always going to feel nostalgia for musica sertaneja, “ Meira said. “The parents, since they are from the interior, are always going to listen to musica sertaneja, and the children are going to hear it.”

One of the most successful sertaneja groups is Chitaozinho & Xororo, a band built around a singing duo of brothers. Their LP records sell more than one million copies each, lifting them to the heights of Brazilian pop music superstars such as Roberto Carlos and Gal Costa.

Chitaozinho & Xororo wear blue jeans, cowboy boots and Western-style leather jackets with fringed sleeves. Some of their songs are adaptations of American country music.

But the sertaneja boom is not the only thing that has given a boost to American country music in Brazil.

Western movies and television programs helped lay the groundwork by making the American cowboy a familiar figure to most Brazilians. In the interior of Sao Paulo and nearby states, the American quarter horse and American-style rodeos have become part of the landscape.

At quarter horse shows and competitions, regulations require Western saddles and Western garb. There are no regulations for the music, but it is usually sertaneja or American country, often played by live bands.

Until two years ago, the Brazilian quarter horse and rodeo set had trouble finding Western clothes in Brazil.

“We had to buy the clothes in Texas,” said Lucia Verissimo, a Brazilian actress who owns seven competition quarter horses.

Verissimo opened Sao Paulo’s first Western wear shop in 1988 and a second one early this year. The stores sell jeans, Western shirts, Western jackets, tooled leather belts, fancy cowboy boots, Western saddles and other horse gear.

By far the most popular country singer in Brazil is Willie Nelson, and most record stores stock several of his tapes and LPs.

Maria Creusa Meza, international music manager in Brazil for CBS records, said Nelson’s albums sell 20,000 to 40,000 copies in this country, far more than most country music.

Only in 1988 did CBS begin actively promoting American country music here. It launched a series of five country LPs that included albums by Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. The series sold a total of 50,000 records. “It was a start,” Meza said.

A similar 1989 series of five LPs has sold more than 100,000. This year, CBS is planning to release a total of nine country LPs in Brazil.

Country music record sales have been heaviest in the south-central region that includes Sao Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city, country has been slower to catch on.

But it is coming. Since March, at the Rio Sheraton Hotel’s pool barbecue restaurant, Thursday night is Country Night. Country Express, a newly formed country band, has been playing there to full houses that include some American tourists but are mostly Brazilian.

Rick Werneck, a Brazilian member of Country Express, said, “There are some songs in country music that if you put in Portuguese words, they become sertaneja. “

“When I heard country music made in the U.S.A., something clicked,” he said. “I identified with it immediately. . . . It’s hard for someone from the interior who likes musica sertaneja not to like country.”