SHOW ME COUNTRY AND ROCK

LEXINGTON, Ky. Tracy Lawrence is a polite 25-year-old who speaks in Gary Cooper sentences and has the country music world by the tail.

In March, Lawrence will release "Alibis," the second album of his career. The first, "Sticks and Stones," spun off three number one singles "Sticks and Stones," Today's Lonely Fool" and "Running Behind." A fourth song, "Somebody Paints the Wall" climbed to number five on the charts.

Meanwhile, he endorses all manner of clothing and musical instruments, and recently helped design his own line of Stetson cowboy hats.

All of which almost didn't happen to the 6-foot Arkansas native who wrote his first song at age 4 and says singing country music is "something I've always wanted to do."

Lawrence, who will play the Show Me Center Sunday night along with country music legend George Jones and Marty Stuart, was in a Gary Cooper-style gunfight of his own one spring night in 1991. Only he didn't have a gun.

The singer had finished recording his first album that day, and took his former high school sweetheart, Sonja Wilkerson, out on the town to celebrate. It should have been one of the happiest days of his life.

But three young men with guns greeted the couple in the parking lot of her Nashville hotel when they returned. The men took their money and keys and credit cards, then demanded, "What room are you in?"

At that point, Lawrence says he realized the men intended to rape his friend. Since nobody was hiding his face, Lawrence figured they'd be killed afterward.

"I decided that if I was going to die, I was going to die fighting," he told a magazine reporter.

Walking toward the room, he grabbed the gun being held to his head and yelled for his friend to run.

She escaped uninjured, but Lawrence was shot four times. The most serious wounds were to his hip and knee. But he was in the hospital only three days and started his tour for "Sticks and Stones" five months later.

Today, Lawrence is mostly healed and probably will get around to writing some songs about that experience. It taught him something, he says. "If nothing else, it opened my eyes to reality. And it taught me to appreciate the people you love."

It's a wild world, not one Lawrence's conservative parents in Fordham, Ark., were anxious for their young son to experience in the rawness of honky-tonks.

Lawrence admits that making his childhood dream come true required a heap of rebelling.

"I snuck into a lot of places I shouldn't be in," he said last week from the tour's stop in Lexington, Ky.

"These were places that would seat 20 people and they'd roll a carpet out for you in the corner."

There were lots of fights, most of which he skipped until the Nashville hotel parking lot. "I couldn't avoid that one," he said.

Lawrence, who attended Southern Arkansas University for two years before dropping out in 1988, was discovered by Atlantic Records at a bar called Live at Hibbs in a small town called Daysville, Ky.

Now he's touring with one of his idols, George Jones, and they'll be out on the road together most of the rest of the year. His parents are very proud of him now, he says.

Tracy Lawrence, George Jones and Marty Stuart will appear at the Show Me Center at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets are $18.50. A $3-off coupon is available at all area Town and Country Supermarkets. The coupons only can be redeemed at the Show Me Center Box Office.