Travis Tritt Is Proud of His Country : Up-and-Coming Singer Wants His Music to Stay Close to His Southern, Blue-Collar Roots

One of the hits that made Travis Tritt one of the most successful graduates of country music’s rookie class of 1990 was a song called “I’m Gonna Be Somebody,” which repeated the oft-told tale of a kid who defies the scoffers, the naysayers and the odds to rise frompoverty to pop stardom.

A trite touch? Tritt says it’s just truth.

Tritt, who plays Monday and Tuesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, didn’t grow up poor, but he says he did have to overcome a good deal of parental nay-saying concerning his musical ambitions.

Speaking over the phone earlier this week from Hollywood, where he was getting ready to attend the Academy of Country Music awards telecast, the husky-voiced singer, who is 28, said that he never had any doubt about what he wanted to do with his life.

“I remember boppin’ around the house all the time when I was 3 years old, singing ‘King of the Road,’ ” the lifelong Marietta, Ga., resident recalled in a gentle drawl. “People would give me a quarter or give me candy” to sing the old Roger Miller song and snap his fingers to it.

At 4, Tritt said, he received his first big ovation after singing the Ray Stevens song “Everything Is Beautiful” in church. Right then, he said, “I got hooked on the applause.”

But as his childhood went on, and he began progressing on the cheap guitar that his parents reluctantly bought him, Tritt found that music made him something of a renegade and a loner in his own home.

“My daddy thought the musician was probably the lowest form of human life,” he said. “He believed if you came home at the end of the day and you didn’t have grease under your fingernails and sweat on your back, you hadn’t put in a day’s work. My mother thought if I was going to do music, it should be gospel music. They thought everyone who does music ends up on drugs, or broke, or both. They (thought they were) basically protecting me from myself.”

But Tritt soldiered on in his bedroom, practicing guitar and soaking up such influences as the folk-pop of James Taylor, Harry Chapin and John Denver, and the raw Southern rock of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

After high school, he got married and tried to make his way in the conventional working world. But he hated his job, the marriage broke up, and Tritt began singing on the local club circuit.

“I was barely making a living. I was living off Vienna sausage sandwiches. My parents were still saying, ‘One of these days you’ll have to go back and get yourself a real job. This is not going to happen for you.’ ”

The old story line kicked in when Tritt found a mentor--the local promotion man for Warner Bros. Records. He touted Tritt to company higher-ups, who liked his work, signed him, and put out a 1990 debut album that has now been on the Billboard country album chart for more than a year and sold well more than half a million copies. It beats coming home with grease under your fingernails.

Tritt could have told his parents, “I told you so,” but he says he didn’t.

“Now, they support everything I do. I think they’ve got every newspaper clipping, every videotape, everything I’ve done. They’re the first ones to admit now, ‘We were wrong. We tried to pour our son into a mold he wouldn’t fit.’ ”

If Tritt didn’t want to join the blue-collar world of his father, who variously worked for Lockheed, the postal service, and as a service-station mechanic, the singer says he now wants to keep his music close to his Southern, working-class roots.

“The whole purpose is to reach out and touch the people I came up with. That’s not to say if you’re a lawyer from Philadelphia you’re not going to identify with my music. But it’s directed at the people I grew up with, the hard-working, lower- to middle-class blue-collar workers who had to work with their hands to make a living.”

Much of that debut album, “Travis Tritt,” was taken up with songs swearing allegiance to country music and to just-plain-folks values. The album included a song of Dixie pride, “Son of the New South,” that lapsed into Charlie Daniels-style chauvinism.

The song’s assertion that “we’ve put the past behind us, it’s time to turn the page” was one of the more grating lines to come out in the past year. The South needn’t grovel before its past, any more than it should celebrate some aspects of it. But those who want to shrug off history aren’t going to learn from it.

“I was traveling and seeing people up north who felt if you’re from Georgia or Alabama, you’re barefoot and bucktoothed and have no education. I think they get that from watching ‘Deliverance’ too many times,” Tritt said. “We wanted to make a statement: ‘The South is not what you think it is.’ We didn’t want to say anything negative about anything, just that ‘we are from the South, we’re proud of where we come from, and here’s a song about it.’ ”

Tritt’s follow-up album, “It’s All About to Change,” which is due for release next month, shifts from fighting belated skirmishes in the War Between the States to examining the Battle Between the Sexes.

“On the first album, the songs that made the biggest impact seemed to be songs on that subject, so we decided to go in that direction,” Tritt said. As a man twice divorced (he has no children), Tritt figured he was qualified to give a firsthand account.

Like his first album, “It’s All About to Change” is a hybrid of straight honky-tonk music in the George Jones/Merle Haggard line, and the tougher, rock-edged music that reflects Tritt’s love for ‘70s-vintage Southern rock. Little Feat backs him on a fast rocker called “Bible Belt”; Tritt covers an old Atlanta Rhythm Section tune, “Homesick,” that employs Allmans-style harmony-guitar architecture; and “Anymore” reflects Tritt’s affection for the ballad style of Bob Seger.

“I’ve taken all the influences I’ve had and put ‘em together and tried to make my own style,” Tritt said, placing himself midway between Garth Brooks’ folk-pop slant on country tradition, and the Kentucky HeadHunters’ heavy-rock take on the same tradition.

“I’d feel just as comfortable doing a duet with George Jones as I would with George Thorogood,” Tritt said. But he is aware that if he wants to stay within country radio’s favored fold, he needs to keep up with the Jones stuff. “Country-music stations will scream all day long that they want uptempo music, but when you give them something with (a rock) edge, there are very strict limitations,” Tritt said. “You can stretch the envelope a bit, but you can’t go outside the bounds. The thing I want people to know is I’m a country boy, I’m a country artist.”

Travis Tritt plays Monday and Tuesday at 7 and 10 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $23.50. Information: (714) 549-1512.