Hey, Garth, Let Your Sister Have a Turn : Pop music: Singing background vocals has been like home to Betsy Smittle, Garth Brooks’ half-sister, but now she’s going solo.

Just two days after Betsy Smittle picked up a bass for the first time and became a member of her brother’s backing band, she was playing in front of 58,000 people at the Texas State Fair.

Things like that happen when your brother is Garth Brooks.

After that introduction to the big time, and a few subsequent years at the heart of the Brooks phenomenon, Smittle is pretty relaxed about her new challenge--launching a solo career with a debut album, “Rough Around the Edges,” that’s due in September.

“I feel like I have a wonderful job with my brother, and it’s just a little icing on the cake here,” says Smittle, who will be providing the low notes and the high vocal harmonies behind Brooks at the Hollywood Bowl tonight.

Like Garth Brooks, Smittle got her first musical inspiration from her mother--Colleen Carroll, who was a country singer in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Now her daughter has returned the favor by having her do a duet on “This House,” a song on the new album.

Smittle’s father is Jim Smittle, who was the fiddle player in Colleen’s band. After their divorce, Carroll married Raymond Brooks, and eventually Betsy found herself the lone girl in a brood of six growing up in Yukon, Okla.

Though Smittle can afford to be casual about the solo move, her step into the spotlight is accompanied by a couple of intriguing challenges.

First: The inevitable skeptics who will say that she’d never have a record deal if it weren’t for the Brooks connection.

“I knew this question was gonna come,” says Smittle, 41. “Garth has talked to me about this. I’m very proud that I’m Garth’s sister, and I think he’s proud that I’m his sister. And he knows I’ve been singin’ for a long time, and knows that it’s everybody’s dream to do their own album.

“People are gonna say what they’re gonna say, is basically what I’m tryin’ to get to. They’re probably gonna eat me alive. And you get a little callous to it, because I know in my heart what I am. They can say anything they want to, just leave my family out of it. Garth--God, they’ve torn him apart in some of these things. They love you for a minute and hate you the next. It’s just one of those things the world does.”

Issue two: Smittle will be one of the few openly gay women making a bid for pop acceptance.

“I would say that God made us all and he makes no mistakes, and that’s basically all I have to say on that subject at the moment,” says Smittle. “There are obstacles everybody has to go over, and my private life will be my own, even though I’ll probably have people hangin’ out of trees with cameras to get their little smut in the paper or whatever they have to do.”

Andy Frances, the president of NorthSouth Records, the company that will make its debut with Smittle’s album, doesn’t see it as an obstacle.

“It’s like being Garth’s sister--it’s the facts, and there’s no wish to deny it, and people are proud of what they are,” says Frances, who owns the Atlantic-distributed NorthSouth with his wife, Pam Lewis--Brooks’ manager.

“You’ve got to acknowledge and hope that the music carries you,” he adds. “It’s there. If the Advocate calls, we’ll do a story with them. But it’s not the first thing in the marketing plan.”

Smittle started singing folk songs in talent shows when she was in the ninth grade, and by the time she finished high school she’d moved from Joan Baez and Judy Collins to Janis Joplin. After graduating, she played for three years with a female band in Oklahoma City, then moved to Tulsa and gravitated toward the blues.

She backed female country singer Gus Hardin for 10 years, and also played with Ronnie Dunn, soon to be a country star as half of Brooks (no relation) & Dunn, before Garth got her to swap her guitar for a bass.

The pop country tone on Smittle’s album evokes such performers as Bonnie Raitt and Mary-Chapin Carpenter, reflecting a diversity of influences that parallels her brother’s.

“I have kind of the same thought on music,” she says. “He was raised with country, and he was raised with KISS, Journey and things like that. . . . I’m the same way. I love the sincerity of country music, but I’m more drawn vocally toward pop and blues.”

To step out with her own album, Smittle had to overcome her natural tendency to stay out of the spotlight--something that goes all the way back to the Brooks family’s weekly “fun nights.”

“Garth kind of took that over real fast,” she recalls. “We could tell he was the performer in the family. . . . Actually I was kind of like a background singer back then. I would say that I’ve been very content with what I do. I feel like I’m frosting on other people’s cake, when you can turn around and have a pretty good background singer and a musician all in one. That’s what I’ve been and enjoyed it a lot.”