He Ain’t No Citified Cowboy : Pop music: Chris LeDoux is the genuine article--a bronco-bustin’ rodeo champ turned soulful country singer.

Chris LeDoux’s face is a sun-cured, leather-tough sculpture. The squinted eyes set off by cavernous crow’s-feet, the razor-sharp jawline and eternal sandpaper shadow of a beard all make the country singer look like a player in a spaghetti Western.

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But LeDoux, 46, ain’t no movie cowboy--he’s a bronco-bustin’, ranch-ridin’ real deal, in a country music era dominated by pretty boys wearing mall-bought Stetsons.

LeDoux, who performs Saturday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, came to his music career in a most atypical manner. A former world champion rodeo star, LeDoux sold homemade cassettes of his music for almost 20 years before being signed to Liberty Records in 1991. That may not sound particularly unusual, except for two factors--LeDoux sold more than $4 million worth of cassettes his parents manufactured in their garage, and he was signed after country music superstar Garth Brooks paid homage to him in song.

LeDoux believes he knows the secret to his success.

“I think maybe it was because we had a niche that no one was filling,” he said in a recent phone interview from his ranch in Kaycee, Wyo. “I was a cowboy, I was rodeoing and I was writing songs about the lifestyle--ranch lifestyle and things of the West. Nobody in Nashville, New York or L.A. was doing that. My folks were totally responsible for the marketing. They had a mail-order business and advertised through Western publications. My brother went on the road and set up booths at livestock shows and sold them.

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“It was like a Western Underground, and that’s why I figured that would make a good name for my band. There’s a whole lot of space between Nashville and L.A., and we were sort of filling that big, wide-open, spacious gap.”

LeDoux was already establishing himself as a major rodeo star before he took up guitar in high school. But he didn’t think seriously about a music career until after he married in 1972.

“I was still in my prime, but I thought about the fact that I might end up being crippled one day,” he said. “I didn’t want my wife to starve, so I thought maybe I’d better put some songs down on a tape to see if maybe we could sell a few of them--never dreaming it would turn into this.”

He released 22 self-produced albums over the years, but LeDoux’s career as a major player really took off in 1989, when Garth Brooks sang about “a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux” in “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).”

“We were just kind of tottering along with our music career when along comes this new guy who mentions Chris LeDoux,” LeDoux said. “Nothing really happened at first, but curiosity grew with the fame that Garth Brooks soared to, and it caused Liberty Records to give me a call.”

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About eight months after “Much Too Young” came out, the two performers met when a promoter booked Brooks and LeDoux on the same show.

“He said, ‘Chris, you don’t know what putting your name in that song has meant to my career,’ ” LeDoux said. “I guess I really didn’t realize how many fans I had, but he immediately won them over by doing that. Of course, I know that it helped me a lot more than it helped him.”

LeDoux’s association with Brooks continued when the two teamed in 1992 to sing the title song of LeDoux’s “Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy” album, which ended up being certified gold.

“He’s a great guy,” LeDoux said. “I probably haven’t talked to him in two years now, because he’s so busy and we’ve been so busy. I don’t want to bug him, and he probably feels the same way about me. But we’ll always be connected, you know, because of that song.”

Unlike the sea of Achy-Breaky, Boot-Scootin’ show-biz types who largely populate contemporary country music, LeDoux continues to sing about real life and plays a hard-working brand of Western music rooted in traditionalism. His albums sell well, but he’s frustrated by country radio’s reluctance to embrace his music.

“We’re putting out an album a year, making music I feel good about,” he said. “Now, if we could just convince radio. I can’t really say a whole lot about that. We’ve got strongholds where they’ve been playing my stuff forever, and I’m grateful for it, but then there’s some places where they won’t even look at it. They go, ‘Oh, he’s just an old cowboy.’ There’s only so much room, I guess.”

Still, LeDoux has a huge fan base, built from years of being an independently successful artist and rodeo star. These aren’t fly-by-night fans either, but people who will remain faithful to the man for as long as he’s willing to strap on a guitar and sing.

“It’s funny,” he said. “We’ve been compared to the same kind of cult thing as the Grateful Dead or Jimmy Buffett, and I’m honored to be thrown in that same category. We’ve got a lot of fans out there, and as long as people keep coming out to the shows, nothing else matters.”

* Chris LeDoux and the Western Underground perform at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. $23.50. (714) 957-0600.