A Double-Threat Contender for the C&W; Throne : Pop music: Clint Black follows the tradition of the genre’s greatest performers, writing and singing his own material.

A few years ago, G. A. Black of Houston, Tex. told his youngest son, Clint, that he ought to forget about writing country songs and just concentrate on singing other people’s stuff.

In a backhanded way, this fatherly advice helped spur Clint Black to become what he is today: by far the hottest rookie in country music, with platinum-selling stardom founded on an ability to leap over the Nashville version of the Berlin Wall, the one that segregates the singers from the songwriters.

“I was 24 at the time,” Black, now 28, recalled in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Rochester, N.Y. (Black opens for Alabama in a sold-out concert tonight at the Greek Theatre and at Irvine Meadows on July 15).

G. A. Black was a country music fanatic who figured that real songwriters need a substantial fund of life experience to draw upon. Serve prison time like Merle Haggard. Battle the bottle like George Jones. Walk that hard line, like Johnny Cash. Then you can tell the world about it in a song.

“He said, ‘You really haven’t done enough living--shooting pool, drinking beer and getting in fights,’ ” Black said, slipping into the tale in his easygoing, deep and mellow Texas twang. “That’s what he believed, and he discouraged me. ‘Go look for (other writers’) songs, or go get drunk and get in fights.’ ”

Instead, the younger Black got ornery. “I went home and in 20 minutes I wrote ‘Nothing’s News’ to show my dad that proverb was true--you don’t have to stick your hand in the fire to know how it feels.”

The song, about an ennui-stricken protagonist who pines for beer-drinking, barroom-brawling days gone by, eventually wound up on Black’s 1989 debut album, “Killin’ Time.” Today, “Killin’ Time” has sold more than a million copies, spent an aggregate of 20 weeks at the top of the Billboard country albums chart (where it remained last week), entered the Top 40 on the pop albums chart, and produced four No. 1 country singles. Now, in a bid for a fifth, “Nothing’s News” has also been released as a single.

Coupled with his sweep last April of four Academy of Country Music awards, Black’s debut success establishes him as a peer of George Strait and Randy Travis in the running for most popular figure in country’s young traditionalist movement.

The big difference is that Strait and Travis don’t write much of their material. Black does--either by himself, or in collaboration with his band’s guitar player, Hayden Nicholas.

Black began playing the harmonica at 13. Then he moved on to playing the guitar and singing. By the time he was 16, he was running around his neighborhood, playing songs for anyone who would listen.

Black’s break came in May 1987, when a Houston record promoter who had taken an interest in him gave one of his tapes to Bill Ham, manager of the rock band ZZ Top.

“Two days later I was sitting in (Ham’s) office. I played him everything I’d written. He said, ‘Well, I think you ought to take off in country music running as swiftly as you can go”--with Ham paving the way as his manager.

Ham’s words about moving swiftly proved prophetic. But with instant success comes heightened pressure to sustain it. Black said he is 70% finished with his second album, which is scheduled for an October release.

“As long as the songs can stand up and compare in quality in my mind--I trust my judgment there,” Black said. “If the popularity wanes a bit, I’ll have to deal with it. The whole aim is just to try and settle in to where I can do this comfortably for the rest of my life.”