Country music is the most popular format on commercial radio stations in the United States. Actually, most country stations play something that's closer to pop than country. The subject of today's Global Hit sings the real stuff. But you'd never mistake him for Hank Williams or Merle Haggard. Julie Caine reports from San Francisco.
In the late 1960's a Tokyo high school student heard a sound unlike anything he'd ever heard before.
Audio slideshow produced by Julie Caine. Photographs by Lenny Gonzalez.
HIRANO: "I clearly remember that image of sound coming through the radio."
It was the lonesome yodel of country music legend, Jimmie Rodgers, and it changed Toshio Hirano's life. Forever.
HIRANO: "Even before I even understood the lyrics, I felt so close to the ground, somehow. And his yodel, very dusty, you know, dusty yodel."
REPORTER: Do you yodel?
HIRANO: Yeah, I try to imitate him."
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But Hirano is not just a copycat.
He left Tokyo in 1974 right after graduating from college, and came to the United States. He says he wanted to see this country because of the music.
HIRANO: "That happened here! In this land. In that region. With these people."
He spent the summer riding a bicycle through the hills of Appalachia - learning old time tunes and playing his banjo on the back porches and in the honky tonks of the American South.
He eventually settled in San Francisco. Now 57, he works as a teacher's aide for students learning English as a second language. By night, some 40 years after American country music touched him so deeply, Toshio Hirano is busy returning the favor.
We're at a live music club in San Francisco's hip Mission District. Over a hundred people are crowded into the bar, filling it to capacity. Lanky and beanpole thin, Hirano is grinning from the stage.
He's wearing a blue and white checkered shirt and a skinny, red cowboy tie. A weathered guitar is slung around his neck.
On the wooden dance floor, couples laughingly take a stab at the two-step.
VOX : "You know initially what maybe gets some people in the door is a novelty factor, it's a Japanese-American guy singing old Jimmie Rodgers, and then once you're in the door, you recognize how brilliant he is and how good it is."
"Like he doesn't just sing the country song, like he sings the country song with the same sort of American spirit in which it was written, I think."
...And it's usually singing about heartache, and that's something everybody can feel, right?"
Hirano doesn't perform any original songs - but he has painstakingly memorized about 120 classic country tunes.
HIRANO: "I listen, I absorb it, digest it."
In Japan, music fans are true fanatics - copying in exacting detail every possible nuance of a singer's style. But Hirano did more than join a fan club and mimic an artist. He's taken his fanaticism to another level. He's become a kind of country music evangelist.
HIRANO: "Hey Toshio I saw you two months ago here. You know what? After I listened to that Jimmie Rodgers song, I liked it and then I went to buy Jimmie Rodgers CD. (laugh) That was the best one, right, best comment, best result (laugh). Mission accomplished kind of thing."
