Signature Piece : Singer-songwriter Wayne Hancock, a throwback to Hank and Jimmie, is pushing for a revolution in country music.

When John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, he wrote his name in extra-large letters, saying that he wanted to be sure King George would be able to read it without his spectacles.

Wayne Hancock brings a similar brash insistence to the world of country music. Like his patriotic namesake, Hancock is an agitator for revolution. The opponent isn’t the British crown, but the established, Nashville-based powers who rule commercial country music. The Nashville-crats usually exclude from their kingdom anything wild and free and unpredictable that would roil the smooth, reassuring, lukewarm waters of the hit-oriented mainstream.

“That wall has to be toppled,” Hancock said over the phone Thursday from Los Angeles, where he had arrived for his first-ever West Coast concert. “And we’re the ones to do it. We don’t think we’re better than anyone else, but we’re damned good.”

At this point, though, the 30-year-old Texan is strictly a grass-roots revolutionary. His recently released debut album, “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs,” is on Dejadisc, an obscure label from San Marcos, Texas. And his first California swing as a performer finds him knocking out multiple sets in such earthy joints as the Swallow’s Inn in San Juan Capistrano (where he and his backing trio were scheduled to play Friday night) and Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim, where they appear tonight.

If Hancock’s longshot revolution should succeed, it will mean that country music has returned to the principles of its own founding fathers. His nasal, piercing voice sounds as if it is coming through a ghost radio tuned to 1949. He keens like Hank Williams and yodels like Jimmie Rodgers, and his album is a sonic throwback that dispenses with drums and relies on a thumping upright bass for the rhythm and a dancing steel guitar for decoration.

And like Williams and Rodgers, Hancock knows from firsthand experience about the times that try men’s souls, and he puts some of that unvarnished life into his songs. But the overall tone of his album is upbeat. He sings about good times in juke joints and the pleasures and frustrations of love with a fierce joy communicated with raw, unleashed vitality.

There’s something edgy and hellbent in Hancock’s voice, something that demands notice. It occurs to a listener that it’s fortunate Hancock found something as constructive as music-making to do with his life, because otherwise he might be dangerous.

Robert “Big Sandy” Williams, whose vibrant work fronting Anaheim’s Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys marks him as a leading expert on authentic roots rock and country music, is a friend and fan of Hancock. He recalls the first time Hancock sat in with his band a couple of years ago in Austin:

“I stood back and listened and thought, ‘This is the closest I’m ever going to get to the way it felt when this music was originally made.’ Every once in a while you hear something that strikes you in a special way, you just get chills. He sounds like he could have been any of the artists I listen to on these old records, and he isn’t trying to be that way. It’s just how he is.”

Hancock’s school days fell during the 1970s and the early ‘80s, but the ruling arena-rock monsters and techno-poppers of the period had no effect on him. He said his family moved almost every year during his early childhood as his engineer father went from project to project.

“I didn’t have too many friends growing up,” Hancock said, so the music he fell in love with was what he heard at home. “I was weaned on Glenn Miller and Hank Williams. I grew up really digging the ‘40s and ‘50s, as well as the ‘30s.”

The family settled near Kilgore, Texas, where he went to high school. Hancock, who had started playing guitar at 9 and writing songs at 11, began making friends with the older guys who liked his kind of music--a pretty rough crowd.

Hancock said that while still a schoolboy he was playing in bars and making an impression as a Hank Williams sound-alike.

“I can yodel, and not too many guys can do that. You could do ‘Lovesick Blues’ and you’d have a table full of beer in 10 minutes,” compliments of appreciative listeners. “They don’t pay you any money, but you sure can get drunk.”

Hancock said he became an expert at the drunken part, which for many years kept his musical hopes nothing but a “pipe dream.” He served six years in the Marine Corps, mustered out in 1988, and spent the next few years bouncing around, mostly in an alcoholic fog.

After the humiliation of getting fired for on-the-job drunkenness at the factory where his father was working as an engineer, Hancock took a brief and disastrous stab at Nashville.

“I was playing in the street, sleeping under bridges. I was drinking so much I probably shot my own self in the foot,” he recalled. Hancock, who has since acquired the nickname “Wayne the Train” for the travel lore in his songs and his high-lonesome way of singing, said the low-level music-industry aspirants and hangers-on he met in Nashville assured him that he was on the wrong track.

“These guys told me I was no good at singing, no good at writing, no good at nothing. They told me I was too country for country. To this day, I don’t understand what that means.”

Hancock gave up playing for a year after that and found himself living in a scary housing project in West Dallas. Only by accident did he arrive in Austin, a promised land for tradition-minded roots musicians.

“My friend was going to Austin and asked me if I wanted to go. I said no. I was going to stay home and drink. Then the guy next-door blew his buddy’s brains out. I just heard several shots fired next door, and I was on my way.”

In Austin, Hancock eventually sobered up--”I stopped drinking in ’93 because I couldn’t do it any more. I was killing myself, and I asked God to help me out and he did.” He soon got his first break as a featured guest singer with the venerable western-swing band, Asleep at the Wheel. A bitter falling out with the Wheel camp ensued, but Hancock’s remarkable voice was starting to be heard.

Joe Ely, a leader of Austin’s progressive-country movement, was among those impressed with him. Hancock said it was Ely who invited him to join the cast of “Chippy,” a 1994 stage musical and album project that showcased an impressive array of adventurous Texas talent. Surrounded by such acclaimed singer-songwriters as Ely, Butch Hancock (no relation), Terry Allen and Robert Earl Keen, Hancock managed to stand out. He sang two tracks, including his own twanging composition, “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs.”

The evocative song captures an intimate slice of plains life as Hancock sings about enjoying the stark beauty of the elements from the shelter of a motel room.

“There is something comforting about a big storm and having a place to sleep,” he said. “God knows, I’ve spent some time sleeping in the rain.”

For now, it would seem that Hancock’s raw, throwback style would have little chance to invade the swankier lodgings of the musical world and gain mainstream acceptance. But that’s not how revolutionaries think.

“There’s a very big chance,” he said. “We’re shooting for originality now. We have the sound, and I know what people want. We like the title of a hard-working band, and we are, and I don’t think it will be long until we’re up there with the best of them. You bet.”

In the meantime, this singer of odes to juke joints and honky-tonks doesn’t mind working the sawdust circuit, multiple sets per night.

“Hey man, that’s what we’re about. Bring it on, buddy.”

* Wayne Hancock sings tonight at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St. (at Manchester), Anaheim. The Rhythm Cats open at 9. $5. (714) 533-1286.