POP MUSIC REVIEW : Tanya Tucker Show: Nice, While It Lasted : For the most part, her performance--all 48 minutes of it--at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana was genuine and lively.

For successful rock artists, tours are usually distinct things with a beginning and an end. For country stars, however, being on the road is more like their normal state, and many routinely spend over half the year on the highway.

Given the daily hum of tires and the pressures of facing audience after endless audience, it’s understandable how some country artists’ acts become scripted and robotic. While there were some pat, formulaic qualities to Tanya Tucker’s early show Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, the singer also was generally livelier than one might expect.

The road has been Tucker’s lot since she was 13. Now 32, she has weathered career dips, the glare of oncoming tabloids, and currently is a single mother, raising her infant daughter on the tour bus.

But, for the brief time she was on stage Monday, she genuinely seemed to enjoy sharing her splendid country voice with her fans. That voice was a marvel when she was a young teen, and it has only gained in experience and expression since then. She can make words palpable with her phrasing, and when she belted a ballad line, it sounded like something precious tearing. It further helped that she had a sharp six-piece band capable of lending her strong vocal harmonies.

Claiming to be stuffed from a large Crazy Horse dinner, Tucker seemed relaxed and decidedly less show biz-like than in her past Celebrity Theatre performances. She still concluded songs with her arms-wide “look at me” poses, but also let her hair down enough to grouse about the sound mix and get in a dig at her former musician loves (a set that includes Glen Campbell) by introducing her T. Graham Brown duet tune by saying, “I finally found someone I could sing with and get along with, too.”

Drawing most of her material from the Nashville song mill, there wasn’t always much real emotion in the songs. She did well with what she had to work with, though, lighting a smoldering attitude in “I’ll Come Back as Another Woman” and still chipping at love’s hard truths in David Allen Coe’s “Would You Lay With Me in a Field of Stone.”

That came as part of a four-song medley of her early hits, completed by “Jamestown Ferry,” “What’s Your Mama’s Name” and “Blood Red and Going Down.” Unlike many performers--whose medley song snippets are scarcely longer than the blips in TV ads for hits albums--Tucker pretty much served up the whole enchiladas. In country particularly--a medium where songs often tell a story--listeners deserve to hear the whole thing, and it’s to Tucker’s credit that she realizes this.

Would that she’d been as generous with her entire show. She performed a mere 48 minutes, perhaps a new record for brevity at the Crazy Horse, leaving the stage just when she seemed to be really warming up. She got the sparks flying on “Don’t Go Out,” with one of her guitarists capably filling in T. Graham Brown’s part of the duet. From that she went into her first hit “Delta Dawn.” Despite a heavy-handed arrangement and the countless times she’s sung it before Tucker still sang it with a gutsy boil. And then she was gone.