A softer side to country star Trace Adkins

If you're not familiar with Trace Adkins' music, you might be tempted to dismiss it as simple, formulaic, and slightly sexist. He devotes one song, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," to a woman's posterior.

"There ought to be a law/ Get the sheriff on the phone/ Lord have mercy, how'd she even get them britches on?/ That Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," he sings.

A video for another tune, "Ladies Love Country Boys," depicts the blond, black-cowboy-hat-wearing Adkins strutting down a city street with a herd of women trailing him.

"They raised her up a lady/ But there's one thing they couldn't avoid/ Ladies love country boys," the song goes.

Adkins, 47, is a guy's guy. The confident (not cocky, he says) country singer calls himself an alpha male. He is 6-foot-6, after all. (He plays the Susquehanna Bank Center, in Camden, on July 25, with Toby Keith.)

The oldest of three boys from a small town in Louisiana, Adkins played football for Louisiana Tech University. After college, he worked in the Gulf of Mexico for 10 years on an oil rig, where he accidentally cut off one finger. Later, he once got so drunk, he ran himself over with a tractor. He was even shot. Through the heart. By his wife. (They're divorced now.)

"I've cheated death several times," Adkins says. And that's just fine with him. "There is no greater adrenaline rush than when you think there's a possibility you're about to die."

He just may not tell that to his five daughters, ages 4, 7, 11, 20, and 24.

This is the part of Adkins you might miss if you judge him too quickly. He's a dad. He's shy. He's reflective. Dig a little deeper into his 10-album repertoire, and you will find the softer side of Adkins on such songs as "Then They Do," narrated by a dad watching his kids, and "Happy to Be Here," in which Adkins sings, "I shouldn't be alive/ I've seen the other side/ All I can say is I'm just happy to be here."

Adkins doesn't take himself too seriously. And neither, he says, should you.

"I know that the criticism is going to come, and, hey, people who are going through life being offended by songs are leading pretty miserable lives. They need to lighten up a bit," he says.

At 30, Adkins recalls, he moved to Nashville at the prodding of a club owner who told him: "I wonder what would happen if you threw down the pom-poms and really got in the game. You need to go to Nashville."

He did, figuring he was "just as good a singer as most of the guys I was hearing on the radio. I didn't see any reason why I couldn't do it, too." Five years later, Adkins had his first record deal.

"I don't have the story that I starved for years," he says. Instead, he met the right people, including Scott Hendricks, then president of Capitol Records. They met at an airport baggage claim through a friend he was there to pick up. Hendricks wondered about Adkins' deep speaking voice and how it translated to music. After the executive saw Adkins perform, he promised a record deal.

"I allowed myself to dream, but I didn't allow myself to hope," Adkins says. "I knew what the odds were. I am one of those very fortunate people that [had] my hobby turned into a career."

He seems nonchalant about the whole thing, especially considering his rather dramatic youth. (He wrote his autobiography, Trace Adkins: A Personal Stand, in 2007.) "I'm still that country boy who grew up in the country environment," he says. "I just have a weird job."

Today, performing is his sanctuary, he says, the only place where he feels in charge. Fun now is not about the adrenaline rush of his youth.

"I'm not really the party guy anymore," he says. "I play music! That's what I do for fun. I play golf now and then, and stand back and watch the kids grow up."

Last year, Country Weekly magazine named Adkins "Country's Sexiest Man," beating out Keith Urban and Tim McGraw.

"It's flattering . . . but I find it humorous at the same time. You have to look at the pool they choose from. I know all those guys. I don't think any of them are sexy," Adkins says with a laugh. "And I include myself with that."

Yes, but then, ladies do love country boys.