Each week the spotlight is on musicians...

Each week the spotlight is on musicians making a commercial breakthrough.

CASEY DOLAN

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“Leave the Light On”

Jeff Bates

RCANashvilleArtist info: Bates’ 2003 debut album, “Rainbow Man,” sold an encouraging 356,000. The new album is expected to do even better. What separates Bates from the rest of the blue-jeaned pack is his resonant baritone -- with sexy spoken interludes that make him the country Barry White -- and traditional ingredients such as a keening pedal steel, chicken-pickin’ Telecasters, Floyd Cramer-type piano and an army of fiddles.

Back story: Bates is no faux down-home boy, no rhinestone cowboy; every element in his blue-collar lyrics rings true with his life. The former carpenter and welder was raised as an adopted child in Mississippi by a sharecropper father and a mother who was the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher. After his first marriage failed, he married his manager and formed the band Southern Storm in 1993. He settled in Little Rock, Ark., but the second marriage followed the course of the first. Bates moved to Nashville, married his current wife and developed a drug habit and did a brief stint in jail. Eventually, he kicked his meth addiction, found God, and his wife never left. (As Bates says in his bio: “I sang my songs and told the truth about drugs, stealing and going to jail. Everything.”) In 2002, RCA signed him to a deal, and it’s been onward and upward since.

Influences: Elvis Presley, Webb Pierce, George Jones, Conway Twitty.

Trivia: He was singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” at age 2 and didn’t leave Marion County, Miss., until age 17, when he joined the National Guard.