Stone Sings His Own Tough Life : Music: Give him a heartbreak ballad and he will hit the charts.

Doug Stone remembers how his poor, proud family moved 50 times in 16 years, once living in a mountainside trailer “with bullet holes in the walls and bloodstains.”

“We had a running joke that we’d tell people, ‘Don’t mess with us or we’ll shoot you,’ ” he recalled.

Even at birth, things were difficult. “The umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I was blue by the time they got me out.”

Then, throughout his 20s, he was a good diesel mechanic whose Friday paycheck often vanished over the weekend.

“Lots of Mondays, I was looking to borrow $10 or $15 from anybody I could find.”

The 34-year-old Stone has taken his earthy blue-collar upbringing and lifestyle and put them to music in what he calls “pain songs.”

He’s an emerging country music stylist who uses his baritone to sing raw, aching songs that Epic Records has trumpeted as “the dawning of a new Stone Age.”

It’s on display in his first Epic album, “Doug Stone,” which includes one of the most talked about country tunes of the past year, “I’d Be Better Off (in a Pine Box).”

The song is about preferring to die rather than thinking about his lover being with someone else.

“My brother said the other day, ‘The song that got you started will be the one they play at your funeral,’ ” Stone said.

Other songs in the ballad-oriented album focus on heartbreak.

“Fourteen Minutes Old,” the second single, is a fiddle-filled tune about missing someone.

The third single, “These Lips Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye,” is about self-explanatory stubbornness.

“I can really sink my teeth into a good ballad,” Stone said. “I can just sing the sadness in it.”

Nevertheless, Stone is a lively, upbeat performer who expresses no regrets about an early life devoid of dollars but filled with meaningful experiences.

“I’ve been up and down and happy the whole time,” he said.

He was born in Atlanta and spent his childhood moving around Georgia. He remembers using an outhouse and carrying water because there was no well.

Until three years ago, he made a living as an auto mechanic in the Atlanta area. He often switched jobs, moving from one garage to another, when they interfered with his sideline work: singing at rowdy roadhouses.

With help of a record producer-friend, his singing finally came to the attention of a Nashville recording label executive. Soon he was tuning his voice instead of car engines.

His debut album, recorded even though he was ill with asthma at the time, has spent more than half a year on the country music charts. The three singles all were in the top 10.

“I feel like I’m singing the same as always, just in front of a lot more people,” Stone said.

He views his mission in music as the challenge of touching an emotion in listeners. To that end, his “Turn This Thing Around” is about a spat between lovers and the aftermath when he seeks reconciliation.

In his “My Hat’s Off to Him,” Stone bravely expresses his undaunted attitude toward a lost romance and her new lover.

“In a Different Light” is a play on words about seeing his lover differently than her office associates do.

“If the audience don’t feel depressed or excited, you didn’t do any good,” Stone said.

Stone is one of several new names to emerge in country music in the past year, providing new blood to the field. He’s joined Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Joe Diffie and the Kentucky HeadHunters at the top of the charts. But Stone doesn’t view it as competition.

“This ain’t no foot race. This is an artistic point of view: what songs you pick, how you perform on stage, how you relate to people,” he said.

“I think it’s the rebirth of country music. This is not to say the old ones are bad. But I feel we’re the ones who will carry on the country music tradition.”