Bringing Back a Haggard/Owens Country Sound : Band: Patty Booker, Gary Brandin and the Hired Hands, who are playing in Anaheim, see the Golden Age as the early-1960s California country, rather than Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘30s or Hank Williams’ ‘40s.

As far as singer Patty Booker and her band mates in the Hired Hands are concerned, when God invented country music, on the first day He created Buck Owens and the Bakersfield sound.

Indeed, to this vibrant band that spends most nights pounding out country classics as well as its own compositions in a handful of Orange County honky-tonks, country music’s Golden Age wasn’t the early ‘30s of Jimmie Rodgers or the late ‘40s of Hank Williams. It was the early ‘60s of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and other progenitors of California country.

That may be oversimplifying things a bit, since the group’s influences also run to such Southern stalwarts as George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn.

But it was largely the California contingent that inspired Booker to form the Hired Hands five years ago, after meeting steel guitarist and songwriter Gary Brandin.

That musical foundation is instantly apparent in the band’s sound, which is built around Rick Shea’s twangy Fender electric guitar and Brandin’s sinewy steel guitar and extends a tradition that sprang up three decades ago out of the dust and oil fields 100 miles north of Los Angeles. Along with Booker and Brandin, who also doubles on lap steel and electric guitars, the Hired Hands include bassist Keith Rosier and drummer Larry Mitchell. Shea also frequently takes the spotlight, handling lead vocals with a style that bridges the affability of Rick Nelson and the drawn-out phrasing of John Anderson.

Booker, who plays rhythm guitar, brings to bear a craggy expanse of a voice that alternately recalls the feistiness of Brenda Lee, the vulnerability of Tammy Wynette and the steely resolve of Loretta Lynn.

“I listened to all those girls, but the one I listened to the most and identified with the most was Loretta,” Booker, 33, said recently. “All her songs were like her life story.”

That sense of connection to a real life is something Booker said she believes is missing in much of today’s country music, the new traditionalist movement notwithstanding.

“Something I get real frustrated with,” she said, “is when you hear something cute or clever instead of something real. Even now, that seems to be sticking out like a sore thumb. And you can always tell when something is real. . . . My songs come more from what I feel, where I’ve been.”

Where she’s been most of her life is in Southern California. Born in San Pedro to parents transplanted from Oklahoma, Booker spent much of her childhood inundated with country music--West Coast style.

“We used to go down every Sunday to watch ‘Cal’s Corral,’ ” she said, referring to a popular local country music showcase on radio and TV with host Cal (“I’ll eat a bug”) Worthington in the early ‘60s in Huntington Park.

“Some people went to church on Sundays--we went to ‘Cal’s Corral.’ I used to sit there at the end of the stage and look up at those people and think, ‘I’m going to do this someday,’ ” Booker said.

Realizing that goal, however, has taken longer than she expected because she had started a family before graduating from high school. She and her three children, now 16, 15 and 10, are in the process of moving from Newport Beach to Brea, after the end of a five-year relationship with Brandin, whom she met in 1985. They later formed the Hired Hands.

Despite the change in their personal relationship, though, Booker said: “We are going to keep writing and recording together, because it seems to work real well.”

Because most of its material is original, the Hired Hands is somewhat atypical among regulars at local country bars such as the Upbeat in Garden Grove (where it played virtually three years straight upon forming), the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano and the Wounded Knee in Anaheim, where the group returns Nov. 13-17.

“You’re supposed to have a large cover-tune repertoire when you play the country circuit clubs,” she said. “But we learned just a handful to get in, then threw the audiences all of our stuff, a few of the cover things and they just seemed to accept it.”

Now that the Hired Hands has established itself as a medium-size fish in the small pond of Orange County country music, and encouraged by the recent strides of peers Jann Browne and Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts, Booker has produced a her own tape featuring eight Brandin originals and one of her own. A confident first effort, it runs from the Desert Rose Band-like country rock of “99” to Haggard-esque spite in “Lovin’ the Bottle” to the ebullient, Buckaroos-influenced swing of “Just Once.”

The band’s next goal is a major-label contract, but Booker recognizes the long, hard road that can be--a deejay at a local country radio station, for instance, told her that the station’s Catch-22 format precluded him from playing records by any local performers unless they are national hits. So for now, she is concentrating on more local bookings and making ends meet for her family.

“I’m facing the prospect now of having to get a full-time day job,” Booker said. “As far as getting our career off the ground, it seems like such a struggle. Sometimes, I don’t know what to do next to get it any further. . . . Musically, things are great--I love the way everybody plays and sounds and writes.”

Patty Booker & the Hired Hands play at 9 p.m. Tuesday through Nov. 17 at the Wounded Knee Saloon, 815 S. Brookhurst St., Anaheim. Admission: free. Information: (714) 635-8040.