‘Keeper of the flame’

Before Joe Nichols sings a note, women begin rushing the Grand Ole Opry stage.

Young women, old women, teens, preteens — they all stream to the front with cameras. “We love you Joe,” several shout in unison.

Nichols, a tall guy with long dark hair and a hoop earring, cracks a joke about bringing his fan club along and then puts his rich baritone to Merle Haggard’s “The Farmer’s Daughter.”

Good looks aside, the 27-year-old singer is at a pivotal place in his young career.

The success of his big-label debut “Man With a Memory” made him a torchbearer for country music’s neotraditionalists. His no-frills style drew comparisons to Haggard, Alan Jackson and Randy Travis.

His follow-up, “Revelation,” continues the hard country sound but with a more somber tone — a reaction, he says, to his father’s death from a rare lung disease two years ago at age 46.

“There are a few more ballads on this one,” Nichols said backstage at the Opry. “I think it’s a little more emotional, maybe a little more spiritual at times.”

Artists who make a splashy debut face a lot of pressure with the next album. The schedule is tighter, the expectations higher and the demands greater. But Nichols doesn’t seem worried.

“A lot of people say making the second album after a successful first is pretty scary,” he said. “But we thought the exact opposite. It felt like the pressure was off. We’d already proven ourselves with one album, and as long as we keep doing the same thing I think we’ll be OK.”

The 11 new songs range from the barroom romp “Don’t Ruin It For the Rest of Us” to the dark title track, a Waylon Jennings cover in which a man wakes from a bad dream and vows to God to change his ways.

Nichols co-wrote one song, the lighthearted “What’s a Guy Gotta Do,” with its snappy wordplay: “So I bumped into a pretty girl’s shoppin’ cart / But all I did was break her eggs and bruise her artichoke hearts.”

But his thoughts are most apparent in the closing track, Iris DeMent’s “No Time to Cry,” about a musician who is too busy, or unwilling, to grieve for his dead father.

“It just reflects my life at this time more than anything I’ve heard,” he said. “It’s an emotional moment on the album for me, personally.”

His father, Mike Nichols, was an Arkansas truck driver who moonlighted as a bass player in a country band. When Nichols made his Grand Ole Opry debut in March 2002, his father was at the side of the stage.

“Of course he was in a wheelchair then, he was pretty sick,” Nichols recalls. “After I was done we cried together and he told me that was one of his proudest moments.”

That Opry show was a career marker for Nichols, who had left Rogers, Ark., for Nashville when he was just 18. An independent, self-titled album flopped in 1996 and he kicked around Nashville playing clubs and working a series of odd jobs, including bartender, cable guy, UPS truck loader and, for one day, door-to-door steak salesman.

After 31 record company rejections, he was finally signed in January 2002 by startup label Universal South. Not only was the label new, so was the producer, Brent Rowan, an ace studio musician who had never produced an album before.

Somehow, the combination clicked. “Man With a Memory” has sold nearly a million copies. The first single, “The Impossible,” reached No. 2 on the Billboard country chart while the follow-up “Brokenheartsville” went No. 1.

And in one of the industry’s real shockers that year, both Nichols and the album were nominated for Grammys — pitting him against superstars Jackson, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and the Dixie Chicks.

“Joe’s a keeper of the flame,” said Brian Philips, general manager of Country Music Television. “In every era we need those and we need new ones. There will always be a place for staunch traditionalists with great chops and a great interpretive style, and Joe is that.”