Unsung Hero : Songwriter Steve Hill still plays local haunts. But his country hits are making appearances all over, including in the Top 10.

Steve Hill might have to miss one of his local appearances next month--he’ll be flying to Nashville in October to accept awards for writing two of the most-played songs on country radio last year.

You might know singer-guitarist Hill’s name from the marquees of local haunts. He has often played at the Hungry Hunter in Thousand Oaks, where he returns Thursday through Saturday nights throughout September. Next month, he’ll be at Champ’s in Oxnard.

But in the music industry, he’s best known as co-composer of several hit songs for the Desert Rose Band. That group, constantly in the country Top 10, is headed by Hill’s co-writer, another Ventura County resident, Chris Hillman.

“Steve’s one of the unsung heroes who are great singers but haven’t risen above the bar circuit,” Hillman said recently.

Hillman, a founding member of both The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, met Hill several years ago. “Steve had a little church in Ventura, and I’d come down with a mandolin and we’d sing old gospel songs together. To me, it sounded like something you’d hear on an Alabama radio station in 1935.”

The Desert Rose Band’s second single, “Love Reunited,” which Hill and Hillman wrote together, hit the country Top 10. Subsequent Desert Rose hits co-written by the pair include “Summer Wind,” “I Still Believe in You” and “Start All Over Again.” Then there are the two numbers for which Hill will be cited by Broadcast Music Inc. next month: “Story of Love” and “In Another Lifetime.” And he has co-written four songs on the DRB’s new album, “True Love,” due next month.

Ed Dies, who plays bass in Hill’s band, recently recalled when they were first getting together. “In addition to the standard rock and country songs we were working up arrangements on, he was teaching us all these songs I’d never heard before. One day, I bought a Desert Rose Band album. ‘Oh,’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s the way they’re supposed to sound!’ ”

Hill, who is in his early 40s, grew up in Longview, Tex. It was there, he said, that he once borrowed a friend’s guitar for a week, then asked his parents to get him one.

“Instead, they bought one for my younger brother,” he said. “Not getting one myself built up my desire to play.”

Hill earned his business degree at Stephen F. Austin State University, paying his way through school by working with his roommate, future country singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell.

“We lived in an old chicken shack with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in the closet,” Hill said. “Our job was building chicken coops. One day, a human finger came down the conveyor belt with the chicken parts, which we decided was the end of the chicken business for us.”

While teaching computer science at Tyler College in Texas, Hill met his wife-to-be, Marla. He and singer-songwriter Tom Russell had cut three albums, all unreleased, for Tulsa-based Shelter Records. Marla liked his music, and encouraged him to move to a bigger city.

“We bought a motor home,” she said, “and drove up Interstate 20. We got to a major intersection, where we could have turned one way and gone to Nashville or the other direction to California.”

Settling in Ventura in 1978, Marla got a job at the Broadway on Mills Road, and the couple parked their mobile home in the store’s lot. The electrical system shorted out one day, burning the mobile home to the ground.

“Everything was burned except my guitar,” Hill said. “The air conditioner melted and formed an insulating shell around it.”

That experience, and one several years later, resulted in the song “Homeless,” recorded by the Desert Rose Band with all profits donated to charities for the homeless.

Hill, who had founded the Harbor Light Fellowship in Ventura (the “little church” where he first met Hillman) is active in the Ventura County Rescue Mission, an organization run by Jerry Roberg, who took the Hill family in during a time of need.

Life as a musician gradually improved for Hill, who played at the Chili Factory in Santa Barbara in three different bands--Steve Woods’, Patty Kister’s and his own. He worked with visiting acts ranging from Rick Nelson to Freddy Fender. After a couple years’ unsuccessful sojourn in Nashville (“It’s hard to find an ocean view there,” he said), he, Marla and their four children moved back to Ventura County.

Today, he works on his songwriting. He writes alone, with Hillman, and more recently with members of Zaca Creek, a Thousand Oaks-based group that will be recording as many as five of his songs for their next CBS Records album.

Hill has just finished work on the soundtrack of an upcoming film, “High Heels,” starring sometime talk-show host Morton Downey Jr. and Jessica Hahn of the Jim Bakker scandal.

In his shows, Hill’s set mixes original material with standards ranging from rhythm and blues, Cajun, reggae, and rock ‘n’ roll to what he categorizes as “serious country.”

As might be imagined, Hill doesn’t play small rooms like the Hungry Hunter for the money. “I don’t really need to do this,” he admitted. “But I’m a musician, and I have to play.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Steve Hill Band plays Thursdays, beginning tonight, through Saturdays during September at the Hungry Hunter, 487 N. Moorpark Road, Thousand Oaks. Shows begin at 9 p.m. There is no cover (805) 497-3925.