Team Effort Works at the Border : O.C. pop music review: Tish Hinojosa and some of her fellow Texans deliver a delectable, wide-ranging three-hour show.

The peso’s sunk, and the dollar’s in the bucket, but seldom has the value of a Texas note been higher than it was Thursday night during the Tish Hinojosa-led Border Tour revue at the Galaxy Concert Theatre.

Make that a lot of notes--three hours’ worth, to be exact--sung as often in Spanish as in English during a wide-ranging, all-Texas tag-team show.

There was Don Walser’s almost otherworldly yodeling on old-line country songs and cowboy ballads, Santiago Jimenez Jr.’s sprightly, unpredictably cadenced accordion dances on traditional Tex-Mex conjunto music, and the adenoidal, Dylanoidal delivery of Butch Hancock, whose kaleidoscopic, insightful and often rousing narratives went beyond the Dylanesque and gave him his own distinctive signature, writ large in an energetic performance built on anthemic folk-rockers from his excellent new album, “Eats Away the Night.”

And then there was Hinojosa, whose sublime singing could hardly have been more beautiful and pure, or less self-conscious. Never straining for effect, she grounded herself firmly in the earthy terrain of her styles and subject matter.

Hinojosa’s repertoire in a 50-minute set and two-song final encore included beautiful old Mexican folk tunes and some fine, self-penned country songs and understated, character-driven protest songs about the troubles of Mexican immigrants.

Hinojosa only stumbled a bit in her role as the evening’s hostess. Some of her introductions and observations grew circuitous and abstract. She was involving when talking more concretely about her mother singing lullabies and gabbing in the kitchen with her friends.

Her attempts to lay out a deeper meaning for the Border Tour as an embodiment of the diversity of Texas music touched on good points but tended to drag. Repeated talk about culture and diversity may play at seminars and on opinion pages, but it’s eye-glazing stuff on stage.

Hinojosa’s decision to open the evening with several minutes of winding chat, then a ballad, made for a slow start. But Walser, a bespectacled mountain of girth and good humor under a ten-gallon hat, quickly arrived to put things on track with a six-song set delivered in a rich, piercing voice, and punctuated by that stratospheric yodeling.

Letting out frequent, high-pitched giggles to accompany his between-songs quips, Walser was the disarming embodiment of a gracious, folksy good ol’ boy. In his finale, “Chime Bells A-Ringin’,” Walser took his yodeling to a particularly lofty and airy peak. His handpicked pedal steel player, Scott Walls, ascended with him, creating a delicate swirl of zephyr-like tones that danced around the warbling vocal line.

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Excellent instrumental backup, most of it courtesy of Hinojosa’s four-man band, was the rule in a revue that featured a good deal of interplay between the four principals, plus an invigorating surprise guest turn by Hinojosa’s fellow native of San Antonio, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Rosie Flores.

A five-song turn by Jimenez was notable for the rough vitality of his husky singing, as well as for the dexterity and freedom of his accordion playing; in a rousing conclusion, he joined Hinojosa on “Malhaya la Cocina” (“Curses on the Kitchen”), a 19th-Century Mexican song with a feminist slant. Its bouncing gaiety and pumping oom-pah-pah beat ironically called to mind the Beatles’ ode to domesticity, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

Hancock, known primarily through his songwriter’s credits on albums by his high-school buddies from Lubbock, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, proved a strong performer in his own right in an eight-song set of material from his new album.

Most were mid-tempo folk-rockers with an anthem cast, but the strength of the writing and variety of emotional tone helped him avoid sameness.

He ranged from the wistful love ode “If You Were a Bluebird” to the funny, wild-eyed confrontation with life’s hard knocks related in “Welcome to the Real World, Kid,” to the chastened, death-shadowed closer “Eats Away the Night.” Later, Hancock’s “West Texas Waltz” would serve as the trampoline for a buoyant, all-hands encore.

Hinojosa sang a 50-minute main set and closed the evening with two lovely ballads, a lullaby her mother sang, “Estrellita” (“Little Star”), and her own glowing country love song, “Who Showed You the Way to My Heart.”

She drew widely in Spanish from Mexican folk traditions and more sophisticated cabaret fare, offered tense, coursing Cuban rhythms with “Esperate” (“Wait”), and delved deep into the sufferings of immigrant workers in her own “Las Marias.” Hinojosa’s English repertoire included a splendid original cowboy song, “In the Real West.”

Vulnerable yet firm, able to ascend to a tricky, high-range vibrato when appropriate, yet tasteful enough not to overdo it, she seemed to radiate music more than create it by willed effort.

Hinojosa cites Linda Ronstadt as a prime influence on her decision to sing for a living; but the stagy Ronstadt would be a much greater artist if she possessed the unforced quality that is the essence of the underappreciated Hinojosa. You might hear more natural singers than Hinojosa, but they’ll likely have feathers and wings.