COUNTRY: Rising Star to Appear in San Diego : New and Bright Country Star : Music: Garth Brooks, the latest country music sensation, appears tonight in a concert at Miramar Naval Station, along with the Judds.

It is a Saturday night in early June at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville. A capacity audience of 4,400 is shoehorned into the concert hall to see and hear country music’s latest sensation, Garth Brooks.

Meanwhile, untold numbers of North Americans are either watching the multi-act variety show via The Nashville Network’s cable-television feed or listening to the broadcast over powerful WSM-AM radio.

After an uneven talent parade of has-beens, will-be’s, and who’s-thats, Brooks is announced by 78-year-old country-Western legend Roy Acuff, and the air is split by a collective shriek of Brooksmania. For the next several minutes, fans converge from all points of the hall to snap photos in front of the stage before beating a giddy retreat.

In a smooth baritone stretched by a hillbilly-yodel inflection, the 29-year-old Brooks hits a blue-collar nerve with his hit, “Friends in Low Places.” Later, he brings down the house with “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House,” a song about the bond between “an easy-lovin’ woman” and “her hard-workin’ man.” Both tunes are from last year’s multiplatinum “No Fences,” his second album.

After his brief set, Brooks is joined at the microphone by Acuff, who will conduct a mini-interview in his role as Opry patriarch. The two swap compliments before Acuff asks Brooks to pinpoint the intangible that makes him so special.

The question appears to catch the shy Brooks off guard. After hemming and hawing, he mumbles something about “the good Lord” that gets stuck in his throat. Suddenly, his face clouds over, tears welling in his eyes. Acuff deftly switches gears to keep things upbeat, but those standing in the wings are left with an indelible impression of Brooks that neatly answers Acuff’s query.

In a tough, competitive business that in 1985 chased him home to Yukon, Okla., after a disillusioning, 23-hour stab at a music career in Nashville, Brooks seems genuinely modest, refreshingly humble. Although he has worked as a bouncer, the singer exudes a roly-poly personableness and vulnerability that are rare in a field that tends to reward hard-bitten ambition. That down-to-earth likability permeates Brooks’s songwriting, but it is most evident in his live performances.

Brooks and his six-piece band, Stillwater, will appear tonight in a concert at the Miramar Naval Air Station that also features the Judds and Pirates of the Mississippi.

Unlike a number of self-absorbed country stars who perform as though obligated by some devine covenant, Brooks sings with an infectious, boy-howdy enthusiasm that elevates his above-average voice and a hit-and-miss repertoire of originals and covers. Whether solo-crooning his poignant, marital-bliss ballad, “Unanswered Prayers,” or leading his crack crew on the gently swinging, softly philosophical honky-tonk tunes that are becoming his trademark, Brooks projects a charisma that transcends his physical looks and his musical acumen.

Seemingly better-endowed country artists who have presumed to out-duel Brooks on a concert bill have come away chastened by his winning way with a crowd and by the honest emotion with which he conveys salt-of-the-earth concerns and sentimental cowboy reveries.

Ironically, that honesty recently caused a flap in country circles. Around the time of Brooks’ appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, some television stations--including those in Nashville--were threatening not to air the new video of his song, “The Thunder Rolls,” also from “No Fences.”

The dramatized version of this ominous ode about a philandering wife-abuser includes a suggestion of spousal violence--in the form of wifely revenge--that proved a bit too graphic for telecast arbiters accustomed to calico-cute images by the likes of Randy Travis and Barbara Mandell.

Whatever the outcome of that controversy, the fact that Brooks dares to bring a social conscience to his field will only endear him all the more to the young-ish crowd that is making him the biggest country “crossover” artist since Alabama.

Technically, the Judds are co-headlining tonight’s show, but many in the huge throng (20,000 of a possible 30,000 tickets were sold as of Friday) will be there primarily to see the mother-daughter team of Naomi and Wynonna Judd in the local edition of their seemingly endless “Farewell Tour.”

As the top-selling mother-daughter singing duo in country- music history, the Judds had already secured themselves a niche in the Nashville pantheon when mama Naomi announced last October that she was retiring from live performance due to a diagnosis of debilitating, chronic hepatitis. Shortly thereafter, the Judds embarked on their final tour together.

Cynics might find it interesting that the same illness that reportedly is forcing Naomi to abandon the rigors of the road has had little or no effect on a tour now into its eighth month. But probably there will be very few cynics in attendance at tonight’s concert, where the Judds can be counted on to sing such recent hits as “Love Can Build a Bridge” (from the current album of the same name) and the Wynonna-penned “One Hundred and Two.”

Garth Brooks, the Judds, and Pirates of the Mississippi will perform tonight at the Miramar Naval Air Station (open to the public). The show on the Tarmac outside the Top Gun Hangar begins at 7:30 p.m. Gates open at 5:30 p.m.