Off the Floor, Onto the Ladder : Her second album may decide whether country singer Jann Browne keeps rising or fades downward into the pack.

If Jann Browne takes a few steps from her front door, she can see the promised land.

No more than a mile away, amid bare, dune-like, green- and dun-colored hills, rise the white structures that mark the upper rim of Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. The 15,000-capacity concert bowl is one of the pop palaces where country singers like Browne go when they’ve made it big.

“I spend a lot of time up in those hills. I take my dogs up there and watch them chase coyotes. I do a lot of contemplating, serious thinking,” the tiny singer with the mild twang and gentle huskiness in her speaking voice said Tuesday during an interview in the townhouse where she has lived for the past 10 years, almost within arm’s reach of those hills.

For most of that time, Irvine Meadows has been in ready view, but not even remotely within reach. From her arrival in Orange County in 1978, Browne was a singer making a living on country music’s sawdust-covered ground floor. For five hours a night, five or six nights a week, she and her back-up players “would have to be a human jukebox and play whatever was on the charts” as they plied the local circuit of bar rooms and honky-tonks.

Now, symbolically speaking, the view from Browne’s front yard to Irvine Meadows looks a little different. At 36, she still faces a long climb on the career ladder before she can have any hope of headlining a big amphitheater. But with a successful, well-received debut album behind her, Browne is finally off the floor and out of the sawdust. She has her foothold on the ladder.

Browne, who plays Friday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, finally emerged on the national country scene this year with “Tell Me Why.” The album yielded two Top 20 singles on the Billboard country charts and hung on for six months on the albums chart before dropping off two weeks ago. From June through mid-October, Browne kept up a steady regimen of club dates and county fair gigs that helped establish her as a contender. The Coach House show, and a Nov. 10 concert in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., that will be taped for cable showing on the Nashville Network, mark her final performances to support the album.

Browne’s musical career began in the mid-1970s in a cabin beside a river, eight miles outside her hometown of Shelbyville, Ind. That’s where she and her first band rehearsed.

“We were terrible, but we had fun and we were very committed to doing what it takes,” Browne recalled as she sat in a neat, airy living room dominated by earth tones and decorated with craft items, art objects and wall hangings in Western, Mexican and American Indian motifs. Browne said her old cabin in Indiana was the ideal place for a novice band to practice. “We were far enough out of town so we wouldn’t hurt anybody’s ears,” she recalled with a laugh.

Browne’s grandparents, with whom she lived during much of her childhood, had been professional square dancers. But while she grew up with country music, Browne recalled, it took a few years for country to grow on her.

“Did I take to it right off? No, I was very rebellious. I didn’t indulge myself in it any more than I had to. I had to tag along on Saturday nights to watch (the square dances). I wasn’t too thrilled about it in those days. I couldn’t wait till the bluegrass band stopped playing so I could go over to the jukebox and hit something really cool.” Motown and Aretha Franklin were more Browne’s speed, but classic country also caught her ear. “I didn’t admit it to people, but I occasionally stuck a Merle Haggard or Buck Owens record on and very much enjoyed it.”

Around the time she started her cabin band, Browne fell for the blend of rock and tradition-minded country music created by Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Bros., and, especially, Emmylou Harris.

“That’s what changed my mind, and I started re-evaluating what I wanted to do. It was very appealing to me. You start digging into those albums and finding the writers of those songs, like the Louvin Brothers. It just snowballed.”

Before long, Browne and her band were out of the cabin and on the road, playing the sawdust-floor circuit through the Midwest and the South. She steered clear, though, of the place that beckons most aspiring country careerists.

“I was really afraid of Nashville. There were so many people trying to do the same thing I was trying to do that I deliberately stayed away. I knew I wasn’t ready for any big, major thing to happen in my career because I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. I needed time and experience in the honky-tonks.”

Browne wound up with more of that than she bargained for.

She came to Orange County at the suggestion of her mother, who was living in Costa Mesa. Her bar-band regimen continued.

“I probably played every honky-tonk, dive and bar in Orange County at one time or another,” she said. “The tough part to me was singing five hours a night and singing cover material that I didn’t always like. But I was making a living, and that was my first priority. Those nights got long sometimes. I would have to take sabbaticals and talk myself into going back.” Those breaks to recharge usually lasted a month or two, but at one point in the mid-’80s, Browne said, she felt so burned out that she took a full year off.

Browne got a taste of somewhat higher-profile touring from 1981 to 1983, when she performed with Asleep at the Wheel, the well-regarded Western swing band from Austin. Browne said she got the gig by jumping on stage and belting a soulful “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with the band when its regular female singer failed to come back for an encore in a Los Angeles club show in which Browne had been the opening act.

But when Browne resumed her solo career, the Asleep at the Wheel credential didn’t leave her any closer to landing a recording deal.

“I talked to a lot of the ‘Hey, baby, I’m going to make you a star’ kind of producers, but it just didn’t click,” Browne said.

The tiny Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano had always been Browne’s favorite gig, the place where she had a following that would let her play what she pleased instead of demanding a replay of the current country hit parade. There, she began singing with Steve Fishell, a member of Emmylou Harris’ band who was moonlighting at the Swallows with a group called the Gizzard Brothers. With Fishell as her producer, Browne finally landed a contract with Curb Records.

When “Tell Me Why” was released last January, Browne tried to keep her hopes in check. “It just felt like a sense of accomplishment to have my own album out there. I didn’t know if it was a good idea to have too many expectations or big dreams.”

Fishell had recruited an all-star group of backing players for the album, including Browne’s key influence, Harris, who sang harmony vocals on “Mexican Wind” (Browne wrote the song with her husband and road manager, Roger Stebner, and Pat Gallagher, an old friend from Shelbyville).

“Tell Me Why” earned good reviews, and it yielded two modest hits--the plaintive but rocking title song and the sassy “You Ain’t Down Home.” It was enough to launch Browne as a touring act, sharing bills with the Kentucky Headhunters, Vince Gill and Restless Heart, reuniting with Asleep at the Wheel at the Farm Aid show, and joining George Jones for a duet on a Canadian television show.

That taste of success hasn’t made Browne cocky. All those years in the bars must have had a chastening effect because she sounded wary as she talked about her prospects. There were lots of times, Browne said, when it seemed that she would be stuck at the barroom level, and she isn’t entirely convinced that those days are gone for good.

A lifetime of honky-tonks “was a strong possibility, and it still could be,” Browne said. “I have a long way to go before I’m an established artist.”

With Fishell again producing, work on her second album is almost complete. It’s a pressure-laden moment in Browne’s career: a sophomore release can decide whether a contender keeps rising, or fades downward into the pack. “I didn’t sit down and become too analytical” about how to proceed, she said. “I tried to choose songs that would work for me. I think it’s a little feistier than the first album.”

When she takes her walks in the nearby hills, or heads out to the desert landscape that she loves and uses as a regular retreat, Browne will try not to think of the career pressures that come with having to follow up on a promising start.

“That could cause me sleepless nights if I dwell on that too much, and I try not to,” she said. “Of course I’m scared of the sophomore jinx. I stay pretty low-keyed about these things. I’m afraid to get my hopes up too high. I’ll just see what it’s going to do.”

With the interview over, Browne stepped outside into a sunny afternoon that afforded a clear view of Irvine Meadows, looming in the nearby hills.

“If I ever do get to play there,” she said, “I promise you I will walk.”