Moorer the Merrier

Allison Moorer is this year’s most highly praised newcomer in country music, on the strength of “Alabama Song,” an album that has rallied critics frustrated with Nashville’s slick, formulaic norms.

Her firm grounding in traditional styles and an unswerving commitment to expressing authentic feeling in her own way make Moorer a rarity among emerging artists on mainstream country labels.

At 26, she would rather model herself after outsiders such as Dave Alvin and Lucinda Williams, knowing that such an approach makes her commercial path circuitous at best, given country radio’s reluctance to experiment with songs that aren’t smooth, gleaming and more or less interchangeable with everything else on the air.

For fans who enjoy country music of the pre-Garth era, the Alabama-raised Moorer’s nuanced use of a forceful voice recalls a variety of rewarding sources. She commands the full-on, aching twang of Tammy Wynette, the austere, spacious and lonesome feel of k.d. lang’s fling as a country classicist and the dignified yearning and folk balladeer cadences of Bonnie Raitt, circa “Angel From Montgomery.”

Having chosen the subtle, art-first approach, Moorer, who opens for Junior Brown tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, is letting herself enjoy some of the smaller markers of success that a performer aiming at the big commercial score might take for granted.

Last weekend brought the first encore of her career; previously a backup singer for her older sister, Shelby Lynne, Moorer began touring on her own less than two weeks ago. Last week also marked her album’s debut on the Billboard country chart. Even though her spot was No. 75, the lowest available, Moorer says she felt happy and encouraged.

“I was real surprised,” she said Tuesday over the phone from her home in Nashville. “To do that in your first week without any radio play is really good.”

Moorer’s first encore came in her late show Saturday at the Bottom Line in New York City, where she opened for country veteran Hal Ketchum.

“I was shocked,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those people who plan for an encore. I think that’s egotistical to assume.”

Still, Moorer had inadvertently left an ace up her sleeve: During the set, she had decided she didn’t feel like playing “Is Heaven Good Enough for You,” the powerful, half-loving, half-angry lament for a dear one’s death that closes her album. When the crowd cried for more Moorer, she delivered.

Moorer was immersed in country music from earliest childhood, with a musical mother who brought her two daughters up harmonizing, and a father who taught high-school shop classes and fronted a country band on weekends.

Moorer’s list of influences is a who’s who of hall-of-fame types no longer heard on country radio playlists gone voluntarily amnesic. Wynette and George Jones, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris and Hank Williams were favorites in the Moorer household in Frankville, Ala., a tiny rural community a 45-minute drive from the nearest significant town, Jackson.

Moorer remembers riding to Jackson when she was about 3, harmonizing with her sister and parents; the family car was an old clunker with a broken radio.

It’s good that Moorer has such a comfortingly Norman Rockwellian, admittedly hokey childhood memory to relate. In one of the most horrific childhood episodes that any country artist has endured, Moorer’s father shot and killed her mother, then himself, when Allison was 14 and her sister was 17.

In a 1989 interview with the Chicago Tribune, sister Lynne, who uses her middle name as a stage name, said the murder-suicide was the denouement of years of drinking and abusive behavior on her father’s part; the girls and their mother had settled in a new town when he confronted her.

Moorer quietly asked for understanding when the subject of her parents’ deaths came up: “I really don’t want to talk about that. Shelby talked about it a lot, and I just don’t want to.”

The emotionally complex “Is Heaven Good Enough for You” stands as her memorial to her mother. Besides grieving for a loved one’s death, the song calls into question the supposed heavenly powers that allow tragedy to occur: “I was raised not to question promises the Bible makes / But how could the Almighty make such a terrible mistake?”

“That’s a real human emotion to have,” Moorer said of the anger against heaven embedded in the song. “Maybe sometimes people are afraid or ashamed to admit that. I’m definitely not trying to be blasphemous in any way. I’m sure there will be some people who feel that way, but what are you going to do?”

Growing up as the younger sister, Moorer says, she naturally fell into the second-fiddle harmonizing role behind the ambitious Shelby, who scored a record deal in 1988 and was named top new female vocalist of 1991 by the Academy of Country Music.

Still, big sister hasn’t enjoyed a big commercial breakthrough, despite a striking voice that one Times critic said qualified her as “a sort of country Whitney Houston [with] a set of pipes that could crush granite.”

When Moorer graduated from the University of South Alabama, Mobile, in 1993, she headed straight to Nashville with no ambition beyond her accustomed backup role.

Her turning point came shortly, when mutual friends introduced her to Doyle Primm, an Oklahoman who had played the country-bar circuit in his home state.

Primm gave Moorer guitar lessons and turned her on to a fresh set of influences, including Dave Alvin and Lucinda Williams. The two began writing songs together; Moorer for the first time. They married three years ago.

Tapes that Moorer and Primm recorded in their kitchen began to make the rounds in Nashville, and several rejections led them to write the album track “Long Black Train,” in which (with poetic license) she sings of being run out of a town that’s too tough.

A tape of one of her rare concert appearances--a one-song performance to raise money for the family of songwriter Walter Hyatt, who died in the 1996 ValuJet crash in Florida--brought Moorer to the attention of MCA Nashville President Tony Brown, who signed her.

Raves for Moorer began flowing earlier this year, when her sad, post-breakup ballad, “A Soft Place to Fall,” was featured in Robert Redford’s film “The Horse Whisperer.”

Moorer sang the song in a barn-dance scene in the movie. On the soundtrack album, she was surrounded by a stellar lineup of progressive and traditionalist country music performers, including Williams, Harris, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, the Mavericks, Iris DeMent, George Strait and the Flatlanders partnership of Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

Moorer’s label, with a hard row to hoe at country radio stations, is trying to capitalize on her glowing press notices to build a word-of-mouth phenomenon.

Moorer enjoys the praise but tries to keep it in perspective: “It makes me happy when people say nice stuff, but I try not to take it to heart. If you pay attention to the good, you’ve gotta pay attention to the bad.”

Moorer’s album--she co-wrote all but one track, collaborating mainly with husband Primm--casts her as a model of restraint who can communicate deeply with just a tremor of her dusky alto voice, or with an approach to dynamics that values the near-whisper more highly than the cry of unleashed passion. It’s the Ronstadt-clone Faith Hills, endlessly bellowing, “THIS KISS, THIS KISS,” who reap the big rewards these days, not the heiresses to Harris’ intimacy.

Moorer knows this but doesn’t care.

“I’m a fan of singers who do things with more soul, as opposed to just showing off,” she said. “I don’t know how my style got to be that way. I guess it’s just who I listened to. I’m a big fan of songs, and I like to let the songs speak for themselves a lot of the time. It’s more about music, as opposed to showing off vocally on every song, saying, ‘Look what I can do.’ ”

Moorer says she is prepared to cast her lot with the Dave Alvins and Lucinda Williamses, outsiders whose impact on mainstream Nashville has come as songwriters for hit artists, not as recording artists in their own right.

She placed “Bring Me All Your Loving,” a song she wrote with Primm and her record producer, Kenny Greenberg, on Trisha Yearwood’s latest album.

“People like Dave Alvin on the other side of the fence may not be mainstream, but they’re successful doing what they want to do. That’s how we’re approaching it,” she said.

The best thing that could happen would be a breakthrough for Moorer that would perhaps turn a precarious snowflake of success for traditional and progressive artists (notably last year’s gold-selling album by Lee Ann Womack) into a rolling snowball accumulating momentum and mass.

“I think Lee Ann Womack is really great; she’s got a real country voice,” Moorer said. “And I think Vince Gill’s new album is very good for a move back to traditionalism. I’m very happy that he did that.

“Junior Brown is one of the best things in country music--he doesn’t get played on the radio, but he has quite a following. There’s a lot of stuff that gives me hope.”

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* Allison Moorer opens for Junior Brown tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $25-$27. (949) 496-8930.