Here are a couple of quick thoughts on Josh Turner in concert:

MIKE STONE/Special Contributor

Josh Turner and his seven-piece band, the Tonkin' Honkies, perform traditional country music.

1. There's something refreshingly real about the guy. The former forklift operator from Hannah, S.C., comes off as genuine. That's no small feat in a country industry increasingly seduced by high fashion, expensive makeup artists and glossy public personas.

2. He's pure country, from the old school. His seven-piece band, the Tonkin' Honkies, includes a fiddle player, mandolin and banjo pickers, and an upright-bass player. He even tours with wife Jennifer Turner, who plays keyboards onstage.

But those two points become obvious once you hear Mr. Turner's voice, a barrel-deep and maple-syrup-smooth instrument. During his show Saturday night at American Airlines Center, which was part of the annual Texas Stampede rodeo extravaganza, he delivered an hour's worth of down-home tunes. The gig looked and felt remarkably casual and unrehearsed.

And there's no doubting the sincerity of where he's coming from. He played mandolin during "Backwoods Boy," a rollicking country number laced with Southern rock undertones. "Me and God," performed while the entire band sat around him, had a gloriously bluegrass bent. The haunting "Long Black Train," his superb career-launching single, became a potent audience singalong.

The country music genre needs a traditionalist like Josh Turner as the money-hungry industry continues to turn out so much pre-packaged slick pop.

Yet Mr. Turner should take some lessons on concert pacing and sequencing. For a guy with three albums, he relied heavily on covers. He did Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Just to Satisfy You," Hank Williams' "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," Johnny Horton and George Jones' "I'm a One-Woman Man," and a couple others.

Plus, he focused most of the stint on material from his second CD, 2006's Your Man. He has a brand-new album, Everything Is Fine , that was released late last month. All he performed from that was the single, the kicking little number "Firecracker," and "I'm a One-Woman Man."

Finally, at just under an hour he and the Honkies left the platform to prepare for an encore. That was a mistake. The crowd was leaving in droves. It was too short a set for an encore. When he returned we got a warm, sexy rendition of "Your Man," his biggest chart hit. Mr. Turner has the musical chops. He just needs to tweak them a bit.