The Twang’s All Here

Sara Evans has hair that every American knows, and a voice that, if there’s justice, will soon be known to every American who enjoys country music.

For her Orange County debut Tuesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, this newcomer sported a formidable brunet helmet that spelled “Lewinsky” with a twang. Evans’ broad, round face and big, toothy smile added to the effect.

But the real scandal was the black, feathery tassels she wore on each wrist, complementing her black full-body tights. It made her look like a vintage Supreme or Vandella, or like a refugee from the road show of “Cats.”

But Evans, whose second album comes out next month, is obviously an experienced show-woman who knew what she was doing: She didn’t just shake her feathers, but used them as a running gag to help draw in an audience that didn’t know her from her hits, which thus far are nonexistent.

Her 1997 debut album, “Three Chords and the Truth,” didn’t score on the charts, selling just 35,000 copies, according to SoundScan. But, despite some unevenness, it won her deserved critical raves and cast her as a possible second salvo, after Lee Ann Womack’s breakthrough, in the battle of country traditionalism to regain some footing on the slick, superficial surfaces that cover most everything mainstream-Nashville produces nowadays.

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In her early show Tuesday, Evans, 27, displayed a folksy, winning personality, easily and engagingly interspersing tidbits about her songs and her background, which really is country.

She grew up on a tobacco farm in Missouri, one of seven siblings, and got her start singing in the family bluegrass band. (Onstage, her younger sister Ashley joined guitarist Gary Hooker in a fine job of high-harmony singing.) The outgrowth of that heritage is a natural, authentic country singer’s voice, a rich, large, piercing but well-controlled alto that has a definitive but never-exaggerated twang.

Judging from the six-song preview she gave of her next album, “No Place That Far,” Evans isn’t pressing the traditionalist issue. Pete Anderson, right-hand man to traditionalist pinup Dwight Yoakam, produced her debut album; the producers of the new one are more aligned with the Nashville machine.

The title ballad, which will come out as a single Oct. 5, was a formulaic, I’ll-do-anything-for-your-love scenario with overly familiar images. Still, it had hit written all over it, largely because Evans sold it with such grand passion. The audience of about 150 loved it at first hearing.

There were, however, other new numbers to savor that reflected Nashville’s most honorable side. “These Days” (not the Jackson Browne classic) was a fine, aching ballad with good, direct, economical lyrics: “These days seem like years / When the nights are spent in tears / Tomorrow seems a lifetime away / These days, these days.”

Evans, who co-writes about half her material, probed even deeper into romantic sorrow with “Time Won’t Tell,” a strong new composition by Nashville aces Harlan Howard and Beth Nielsen Chapman.

She gave anguished life to the song’s insightful conceit: that time, which supposedly heals all wounds, is mute when it comes to supplying answers as to why we screw up and gore our hearts in the first place: “There are questions that go on and on, but time won’t tell.”

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Evans also could switch on some natural sass, with songs like “Cupid” (not the Sam Cooke classic, but a fast-paced, humorous snipe at the little love god for making such a mess of human affairs) and “Cryin’ Game,” a good, assertive, rocking number that offered some of the bite of Carlene Carter. “Fool, I’m a Woman,” which she wrote with Matraca Berg, had that poignant, elegiac Rodney Crowell-channeling-Roy Orbison feel to it.

The set also included confident, vital covers of nuggets by Aretha Franklin (“Respect”), Ray Charles (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”) and Buck Owens (“I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail”), along with a less-involving Patsy Cline reading (“Imagine That”).

With A-list songwriters helping her on her new album, and Vince Gill, George Jones, Martina McBride and Alison Krauss providing harmonies, it’s obvious that some of country’s heaviest hitters are pulling for Evans and her welcome breath of authenticity.

She may be the leading early candidate to star in “Monica: the Musical,” but chances are she will soon have much better things to do.