Junior Has a Shot at Varsity : Pop music: The Texas guitarist-singer, who plays the Galaxy tonight, seemed stuck in cult mode. Now he could be on the verge of breaking through.

His voice is as vast and deep as a back-country well in the piney woods of Texas, like Ernest Tubb with a moonshine hangover. The twanging strings of his guitar cut like a newly honed scythe, bubbling and speeding with a graceful precision that recalls the halcyon days of Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West.

He’s Junior Brown, and when he pops that big old cowboy hat on his close-cropped, Lone Star dome and takes the stage, prepare to be transported back to a time when country music was still a rural folk art, and raw talent still was worth more than an Ultra-Bright smile and a $75 haircut.

Brown, who plays tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, grew up the son of a nomadic music teacher and was fascinated by his daddy’s chosen subject from the time he was a toddler.

“I started playing piano when I was 2 or 3, and I picked up guitar when I was about 7,” Brown, 43, said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t really start playing steel until I was in my early 20s, but I always loved both instruments.

“I found my first guitar in my grandparents’ attic,” he continued. “It only had a couple strings on it, but that’s what got me interested. I just took to the guitar, and I was always attracted to the steel because I’d seen the steel players on TV. I was fascinated with that sound, you know, that metal-against-metal sound.”

Brown hit the road in 1966 while still a teen-ager and has been there ever since. Although he settled in Austin in 1988, Brown is one of those musicians who truly enjoys his work and can’t seem to get enough of it--even if it regularly keeps him far, far from the old homestead.

This unbridled enthusiasm for his craft is among the qualities that make Brown one of the most exciting and unique musicians to come down the pike since Jimi Hendrix, whom Brown said he admires tremendously.

In fact, even in the context of hillbilly steel-guitar music, Brown has been known to throw in musical quotes from such Hendrix standards as “Manic Depression” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” snippets from myriad classic guitar licks and wild, free-form improvisations.

“I throw in some of Jimi Hendrix’s kind of improvisation and some of the licks too, but it’s mostly in the approach he took,” said Brown. “Hendrix was real good at improvising, he was real free about it, and so am I.

“I’m all for whatever comes into my head. I’ve got pretty much the same show every night,” he said, “but I always play it differently. Most of the songs I sing are songs I’ve written, but I’ll throw in a medley of surf songs, blues, bluegrass, jazz and Hawaiian. Hillbilly music is home base, something to build off of.”

Long considered Austin’s best-kept secret, Brown was signed in 1993 to Curb Records, which released two albums--”12 Shades of Brown” and “Guit With It”--that year. They showed him to be not only a truly inspired instrumentalist, but a skilled singer and songwriter of such classic-sounding country songs as “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead” and “Doin’ What Comes Easy to a Fool.”

Still, it seemed that Brown was destined to remain a cult artist, since his decidedly non-standard approach seemed to hold little promise of commercial acceptance.

But through word-of-mouth and sheer attrition, Brown seems to be on the verge of breaking through. Life magazine recently honored Brown by naming him the only contemporary musician in its “All-Time Country Band,” while Musician magazine has hailed him as a “genius.”

Brown also has made numerous, high-profile television appearances on such programs as “The Late Show With David Letterman,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Good Morning America,” and “Austin City Limits.”

In July, Curb released “Junior High,” a five-song EP that recycles material from Brown’s first two albums while editing a good deal of the inspired solos from the songs. While disappointing for fans who were expecting a full-length album of new material, “Junior High” could help find him a larger audience. Brown, for his part, seems happy that Curb is now making a greater effort to push his career.

“It’s a promotional thing for radio is really what it is,” he said. “We didn’t want songs like ‘Highway Patrol’ and ‘My Wife Thinks You’re Dead’ to go unnoticed. They weren’t released as [singles] before, and we wanted to promote them.

“I think [Curb] had cold feet at first, they put those first two albums out and didn’t really push ‘em, just sort of waited to see what happened,” he said. “But with this new CD, they’ve been pushing me and that’s why it’s been taking off--it’s all in how they promote you.”

Whether Brown ever becomes a major star, rest assured he’ll keep right on pickin’ and grinnin’--and that he will remain an artist firmly rooted in traditional American music.

“It’s like, where are all the old guys?” Brown posed with a sigh. “Can this music still be done? There’s a real magic in those old records.”

* Junior Brown, the Round-Ups, Todd Handley & the Lone Spur band and Till Kahrsperform tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $13.50. (714) 957-0600.