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with whom Mr. Rich recently crossed paths.

“He put his hand on my shoulder, and he looked me dead in the eye,” Mr. 
Rich recalled. “He said, ‘That new song you have out now, that reminds 
me a whole lot of “Okie.” As a songwriter, that is officially the 
highest compliment I’ve ever been paid.”

But in many ways “Detroit” has less to do with “Okie” and more to do 
with the left-wing protest music of that era. That it comes from the 
other side of the aisle seems a minor detail. “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” is 
skeptical of big business as well as big government — “D.C.’s bailing 
out them bankers as the farmers auction ground” — keeping a song that’s 
postpartisan, at least on the surface, consistent with right-wing thinking.

This isn’t Mr. Rich’s first dalliance with Republican talking points. 
Last year he stumped for Fred Thompson before throwing his support 
behind Senator John McCain and recording a rally song, “Raising McCain,” 
a far less imaginative slice of propaganda. (“He got shot down/in a 
Vietnam town/fighting for the red, white and blue.” )

Now that Republicans are underdogs, it’s a particularly good time to be 
a conservative agitator, and Mr. Rich is seizing the moment. His next 
single will be “The Good Lord and the Man,” about his grandfather, whom 
he said had been awarded six Purple Hearts in World War II:

When I see people on my TV taking shots at Uncle Sam,

I hope they always remember why they can

’Cause we’d all be speaking German, living under the flag of Japan,

If it wasn’t for the good Lord and the man.

“I mean it completely literally,” Mr. Rich said.

Still, these songs — “A couple of sledgehammers,” he called the two 
singles, with evident glee — capture only one side of Mr. Rich’s 
personality. “Son of a Preacher Man” is an eclectic, if often sober 
album, spanning vintage big-band country comedy (“Drive Myself to 
Drink”), dramatic self-confrontation (“Another You”) and shameless 
romance (“I Thought You’d Never Ask,” which Mr. Rich wrote to propose to 
his future wife, Joan).

Mr. Rich has a lovely, crisp high tenor, though it’s deployed to better 
effect anchoring his partner Big Kenny in Big & Rich, the duo that 
emerged in 2004 and helped bring a dash of outlaw sensibility back to 
Nashville. (Mr. Rich had earlier played in the successful country band 
Lonestar but was kicked out as the group moved toward a more 
adult-contemporary sound.) Since then, Mr. Rich has positioned himself 
as a reliable disruptor, culturally and politically.

And he makes for a charming sermonizer. Speaking of his disbelief at 
government enabling of corporate arrogance on the Fox News’s “Glenn Beck 
Program” last week, he quipped, “Why don’t you just come to my house and 
slap me while you’re at it?”

That appearance was part of an album-release media offensive that 
included turns on “Glenn Beck” and “Hannity,” where he answered one 
question with a recitation of the first verse of “Detroit,” and gave 
Sean Hannity a T-shirt that read, “If you don’t love America … why don’t 
you get the hell out?”

But he also took part in an unlikely comic skit on “Late Night With 
Jimmy Fallon” in which he gamely poked fun at rural pieties.

That last bit was the most telling, in that it implicitly asked which is 
the real cliché: the redneck, or the big-city comedy writers who think 
rednecks are all the same? Mr. Rich didn’t seem to mind toying with both 
sides.

Politics aside, Mr. Rich can be refreshingly undogmatic. As the host and 
avuncular mentor on the CMT series “Gone Country,” he shepherds 
once-weres from other music genres or entertainment careers in their 
quests to become country singers. And on the most recent season of 
“Nashville Star,” a country-music competition similar to “American 
Idol,” he was vocal about the need for Nashville to embrace Hispanic 
singers who can connect with the growing Hispanic population in the 
United States.

Mr. Rich, once the outsider scratching at the door, has now become 
something of a gatekeeper, and his idea of border policing suggests 
dashes of progressivism sprinkled throughout his conservative landscape.

“Everybody Wants to Be Me” is the most attitude-thick song on Mr. Rich’s 
new album, all about the long climb to the top. “Everybody wants to be 
me,” he charges, “but they don’t want to bruise, and they don’t want to 
bleed.” The camera’s expectations can overwhelm, he warns: “They take my 
country-boy views, make them big-city news and I just take it on the chin.”

Where “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” is calm and considered, this song is 
un-self-consciously exuberant. As martyrs go, Mr. Rich is the happiest, 
most complicit one around.