Of Three We Sing : Rousing Coach House Concert Underscores Underappreciated Skills of Browne, Gaffney, Booker

I never did have anything,

I never wanted much anyway,

I never learned how to play the game, like the lucky few.

But I know that I’ll survive,

I’m just glad to be alive,

I won’t be like you, one of the lucky few.

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So sang Jann Browne sang Friday at the Coach House in the defiant anthem “The Lucky Few,” and much of the song’s lyric could serve as a manifesto for Browne and her co-billed musical cohorts, Chris Gaffney and Patty Booker.

If this was the 1960s--when unique talents were recognized and celebrated--Browne and Gaffney would be huge, and Booker would be having a pretty good career as well. Were this Austin or Cleveland or nearly anyplace but here, the three would at least be cherished as local treasures, drawing packed, attentive houses.

But this is the 1990s in Orange County and neither a good time nor place to be original and uncompromising. Browne, Gaffney and Booker work day jobs, while their music goes lauded by critics and fellow musicians and unheard by almost everyone else. Browne and Gaffney get more gigs in Europe than they do in their home county.

But, as proved by Friday’s rousing triple-threat show--the first the three longtime friends have done together--they don’t need the success of the lucky few to ratify the rightness of what they’re doing.

For years, they and their bands have been playing their hearts out to a small, loyal audience locally, and perhaps they always will. If they never get the recognition they deserve, shame on us, but the three clearly aren’t sitting around waiting for anyone to catch up with them.

Browne particularly came out blazing in her headlining set Friday. She and her songwriting partner, Matt Barnes, have always had a special thing going, but their newer songs--and nearly all of the 18 songs in Friday’s set were written since Browne’s last album, 1995’s “Count Me In”--were monsters that deserve to be hits. Some likely will be, given that the red-hot Dixie Chicks and Patti Loveless have options on recording two of Browne’s tunes. Still, likable as those stars may be, don’t count on them giving the songs the grit, truth and beauty that Browne’s smoky voice does.

Though Browne and Barnes excel at anthemic country-rock that falls somewhere between John Mellencamp and Lucinda Williams, the scope of their talents is broad enough that their bluegrass harmony gospel song “Get Right With God” would have been right at home on a Louvin Brothers album.

Other standouts in the set included “Trouble’s Here” (covered by Lee Ann Womack on her self-titled hit 1997 album) and the mix of ache and anger Browne expressed on “Missed Me by a Mile.”

Throughout the set, Barnes provided strong vocal harmonies while coaxing a million dollars’ worth of twang from his $299 Danelectro guitar. Joining Browne’s rhythm section of drummer Larry Mitchell and bassist Tom Clift, Nashville guitarist Duane Jarvis (no slouch at songwriting himself) flew in to play second lead guitar and slide in the show, which he did with an empathy that would make you think he played with Browne nightly.

While both Browne and Booker, in her opening set, performed as if they had something to prove to the good-sized crowd, Gaffney’s too-brief nine-song set found him just cruising along in his usual splendor. He puts as much, or as little, worry into a corner bar gig as he does a showcase. Gaffney is just Gaffney--part George Jones, part rodeo clown--wherever you plop him down, and that’s quite enough.

Though he is expected to record an album this year, there were no new songs in the set. Three of the nine songs were covers, four were from his 9-year-old “Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts” album, and two more were ones he co-wrote with Dave Alvin: the powerful, haunting Vietnam tale “ ‘68” and the honky-tonk “Six Nights a Week.”

One of the covers was Alvin’s “East of Houston, West of Baton Rouge” (co-written by Billy Swan), which added up to a lot of Alvin. Alvin’s a fine writer, but a far more predictable one than Gaffney is when writing his own or with his keyboardist Wyman Reese. (With Alvin songs, you can be pretty sure the lyrics will feature both cigarettes and a moral.)

So it wasn’t necessarily a great showcase for a songwriter as distinctive and gifted as Gaffney. (His unplayed “Artesia” is perhaps the only song that could make one nostalgic for the wafting scent of cow manure from the long-gone Dairy Valley).

But on the performance side, it was a delight: from his peppy Tex-Mex accordion on the riotous “Frank’s Tavern,” to his heart-wrenching vocal on his tale of barrio violence, “The Gardens,” to his inspired, loopy bit of hip-hop dancing on “Cowboys to Girls.” (Gaffney wore street-smart clothing--baggy pants, black Santa Ana baseball cap and a black coat of some rubber-like material.)

Gaffney dedicated the old Intruders song “Cowboys to Girls” to drummer Donald Lindley, who died of lung cancer last month (Browne also dedicated a number to Lindley, who had worked with both singers), and Gaffney and his band transformed it into a soulful tour de force.

He’s a powerful, emotive singer, as influenced by border rancheros and R&B; as by country, and he poured it all into the lyric, which segued into a lush-harmonied rendition of War’s “All Day Music.”

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Though they’ve done only a handful of gigs with the full band in the last year, the Cold Hard Facts’ keyboardist Reese, drummer Tucker Fleming, bassist Greg Gaffney, guitarist Danny Ott and pedal steel guitarist Doug Livingston have a delightful interplay and fire in their ensemble playing. Ott and Livingston, particularly, are nothing short of thrilling as soloists.

Gaffney and the band will be recording a live album at San Juan Capistrano’s Swallows Inn from March 26-28 (Browne performs there Friday and Saturday), and that would be a very good place to be.

Booker has been performing on the local scene since the mid-’80s, but she hasn’t yet pushed her craft as far as Gaffney or Browne. She is only just getting her debut CD, “Ultracitybilly,” released in the next couple of months. The songs she debuted Friday--several written with Browne--suggest it will be a fine honky-tonk opus.

Booker has a more traditional country voice than the other two singers (Browne later told the audience that Booker’s so country she makes Loretta Lynn sound like she’s from Detroit), and she keeps her music closer to the old Nashville sound.

She’s not afraid to mix it up, though, as she did Friday with the calypso-tinged “I Didn’t Want to Go” (written with Browne) and a clever sing-along, “PMS,” that might be novel enough to catch radio play.