Collin Raye brings his kind of country to Gallo

When Collin Raye is feeling brave, he switches on a country radio station. In the past couple of years, he’s shuddered at what he’s heard: songs about a cowboy and his truck.

Raye will always love country music, and he refuses to believe country music is a lost cause to what he disdainfully calls the “bro country” now infecting the airwaves. He’ll play the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto on Saturday.

Raye doesn’t sing about cowboys and trucks. His musical abilities have long been the tool for him to spread a message he said is bigger than he is. His songs have addressed alcohol addiction, disabilities and the most basic human heartache in such 1990s hits as “If I Were You,” “Love, Me” and “My Kind of Girl.”

“The message is bigger than me,” Raye said. “God can do great things through you. This is just going to be fun. I’m going to meet everyone that I can.”

His song “Little Rock,” for instance, encouraged listeners struggling with addiction to get help through Alcoholics Anonymous. The song inspired 100,000 phone calls to the organization and others like it.

“Music is a powerful bridge,” he said. “It’s a way to approach a topic that people don’t want to talk about.”

In 2001, the star was honored for his volunteer efforts with the Country Radio Broadcasters’ Artist Humanitarian Award, and while he said he was proud, he also felt a little embarrassed.

“It’s embarrassing in a way when you realize how many people truly earned that award,” Raye said. He recalled a young volunteer he worked with in Kosovo who was helping refugees in the war-ravaged country find a safe haven.

One thing that Raye says he is not so proud of is the string of country music stars who only seem to want to sing about their truck or partying or women. Those “bro country” ideals have begun to poison the genre, Raye said.

Raye himself was long inspired by country legends such as Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, but he said their lyricism and poetry seems to have faded into songs that hold as much value as a commercial.

But “bro country” won’t last, Raye said, and though that thought gives him glee, it also saddens him to know that a generation of country music seems to have been lost.

This story was originally published January 14, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Collin Raye brings his kind of country to Gallo."