Hootie And a Hollerin'

The first -- and, frankly, last -- time most people thought about the Hootie Guy in the context of country music was in 2005, when he appeared in a TV commercial for Burger King's TenderCrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch sandwich. Wearing a white felt cowboy hat and a bejeweled, purple Nudie suit that looked like a Porter Wagoner loaner, Rucker sang an ode to the deep-fried chicken fillet sandwich to the tune of "Big Rock Candy Mountain," an old hobo ballad.

Rucker played the bluegrass jingle straight, but the spot was a surreal sendup, complete with a dancing chicken, a ranch-dressing waterfall and some Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. It was about money, not art. "Do the commercial, buy a pool," Rucker jokes.

But he says he had really wanted to sing country music for years. Rucker was exposed to some of the genre's old-timers when he was growing up, courtesy of his grandfather. But his a-ha moment didn't come until he was 21 and heard "Crazy Over You," a 1987 hit by the country duo Foster and Lloyd. "I remember thinking: Who is this? Why haven't I heard this before? Where can I get the record? Hearing Radney Foster was big for me, like hearing Al Green or R.E.M. for the first time."

Rucker's new obsession wasn't necessarily reflected in Hootie & the Blowfish's music: If the quartet was a teensy bit country, Hootie was principally about rock-and-roll -- namely, rootsy, Southern-flavored guitar-rock that tried to split the difference between R.E.M. and the Marshall Tucker Band. "The other guys in Hootie were into rock," Rucker says. "I brought the country influence."

The band came together in the late '80s at the University of South Carolina and specialized in impossibly catchy songs with considerable mainstream appeal. On the strength of radio hits including "Hold My Hand" and "Only Wanna Be With You," Hootie's 1994 album, "Cracked Rear View," reinvigorated the slumping record industry by selling 16 million copies -- a figure that ranks in the top 20 on the Recording Industry Association of America's all-time bestsellers list. Not bad for a band that critics wrote off as dull and derivative.

"We were a bar band that got lucky," Rucker says with a shrug. "We were just in the right place at the right time with the right record. People were tired of being depressed; they wanted to be happy. We told them to 'hold my hand' and we sold 16 million records." We still believe that nobody does what we do better than us. But . . . we knew we hadn't made 'Abbey Road.' "

The thing that made Hootie so successful -- the stickiness of those songs, which even detractors found impossible to forget -- eventually worked against the band, which suffered a backlash and became something of a pop-music punch line. Radio play dried up, and Hootie's album sales dropped sharply, to 5 million ("Fairweather Johnson," released in 1996), then 1 million ("Musical Chairs," 1998). None of the band's last three albums even cracked the half-million sales mark, though the group continued to thrive on tour: "We went out every summer," Rucker says, "and we made millions."

Still, seeking to shake things up, Rucker says he repeatedly pushed his country agenda on band mates Mark Bryan, Dean Felber and Jim Sonefeld. "On our last three records, the conversation was, 'Hey, man, let's do the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band thing and make country records.' I thought it was a no-brainer move. When we jam, it's bluegrass and country music. When we need to sound-check, we play country songs. But some of the guys didn't want to do it. We're a rock band; we have our niche. I understand.

"But I made it perfectly clear that I was gonna do it myself, as soon as I could."

First, though, Rucker scratched his R&B itch. Having grown up idolizing Al Green, he recorded a contemporary soul set, "Back to Then." Neosoul singer Jill Scott and rapper Snoop Dogg contributed cameos. The album, released by Scott's label in 2002, was a flop.

Then, just as Rucker was thinking about recording a country album on his own in Charleston, Capitol Records Nashville called. Rucker was incredulous.

"I didn't think anybody would give me a record deal," he says. "Hootie had run its course. We still had great touring lives, but nobody was buying Hootie & the Blowfish records. And there's a stigma about being in Hootie. I thought that would be a liability."