If you're standing in line at the roller coaster on Saturday and there's this towering figure of a man standing next to you with shoulder-length, wavy hair and a muscular build, ask him to sing you a song.
"There's no tellin' what I'll do. I have left the stage and gone bungee jumpin'," 6-foot-6 country singer Darryl Worley says of his appearance at the Pima County Fair. It sounds somewhere between a dare and a warning.
Of course, Worley's primary mission on Saturday is to perform muscular country rock, seasoned with some heart-wrenching ballads, patriotic gut-punches and enough energy to get you on your feet and keep you there.
He will sound a little different from the Darryl Worley we saw on that same stage in fall 2005. Gone is the fiddle and steel guitar, replaced by acoustic and electric axes that now define Worley's sound.
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He has said that it was on that stage at that 2005 show that he decided he needed to change a few things. He needed to infuse energy, get his audience moving.
"I have made up my mind to do some things differently. If you go out and play shows and the hit songs that you have to play are all serious, heavy material, then that's the response you get from your audience," he explained in a phone call from Tennessee in early March. "If you have some stuff to mix in there that's just a little bit freewheeling and fun, you keep 'em up. You don't want to get them out there and get 'em so depressed that they want to put a gun to their head before it's over."
Worley showed off his new live act last July in Tucson at The Maverick — King of Clubs. The response, he recalled, was enthusiastic. After the show, he stuck around to party with some patrons.
"That's who I am. I am one of those people and I don't want to be anything else and I don't want anybody to think of me as anybody else," he said.
Worley returns to Tucson with a recently released guitar-driven album, "Here and Now," his debut on Neal McCoy's 903 Music label. The album is decidedly more upbeat and defiant than his early major-label efforts, with songs about drinking, heartache and rejecting Nashville's conventions.
But the first single, "I Just Came Back (From a War)," was reminiscent of his earlier works. The song tips its hat to American soldiers, much as his earlier patriotic odes such as "POW 369" and "Have You Forgotten?"
"It just makes you realize that we don't have a really good idea of what those men and women go through, especially that whole thing about coming back home to the States and trying to get their feet back on the ground," the 42-year-old Tennessee native said.
"They are good people, and they do so much for us. The music is just an attempt to give the civilians an idea of what they go through for us."
Worley's biggest hits in his seven-year career have waved the American flag, pigeonholing him to some degree. But he doesn't mind having a reputation for singing pro-military, pro-America songs, he is quick to note.
"To me, that would be a heck of a thing to be remembered for," he said. "I don't count my success by the awards that hang on the wall; I count my success by the people I affect."
• What: Darryl Worley.
• Where: Budweiser Main Stage at Pima County Fairgrounds, 11300 S. Houghton Road.
• When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday.
• Cost: Free with fair admission: $7 adults, $2 ages 6-10, free 5 and younger.
• Parking: $5.
• Details: www.pimacountyfair.com.
•Online: Hear a sample from Worley's latest album at www. myspace.com/darrylworley.
