POP MUSIC REVIEW : There’s Some Fancy Writing on This Barroom Wall : For his home crowd, the singer relates the honky-tonk experience with more wit than you’ll usually hear in a saloon.

SANTA ANA —  On any night in a thousand honky-tonks, a parade of characters pour out their hopes, regrets and experiences to the sympathetic ear across the bar.

The audience at the Crazy Horse on Tuesday listened in on that world through the ears of Chris Wall, an Orange County history teacher-turned-bartender-turned-songwriter. For two hours, in 27 songs, Wall told story after story from the point of view of the honky-tonkers of America.

Wall opened with “Better Things to Do,” the tale of a former bar-stool cowboy who discovers that love gives his life purpose. In “He Lives My Dream,” Wall took on the persona of an itinerant musician who longs for a wife, kids and a conventional life.

Wall was a trigger-happy redneck in “Something to Shoot,” a lonely trucker in “The Empty Seat Beside Me,” and a honky-tonk loser in “Hangin’ Out.” In other songs, Wall told the stories of an assortment of rodeo cowboys, barroom bouncers, bar bands and trashy women.

Wall’s use of the little details of real-life conversations made his songs ring true: In “I’ll Take the Whiskey (You Take the Wheel),” Wall’s country singer throws his guitar in the back of the car and tells his companion, “Hear the radials whirl; plug in some Merle / ‘Big City’ makes me smile.”

In “Rodeo Cowboy,” Wall’s hero “Got his heart stomped flat like an old spare tire / In the back of his pickup truck / He knows it’s in there somewhere / Under all that other junk.”

Unlike the guy on the bar stool, however, Wall brought a razor-sharp wit and a literate background to his songs. How many real honky-tonkers would paraphrase the French philosopher Descartes, as Wall did in “I Drink Therefore I Am”?

For Wall, the Crazy Horse gig was something of a homecoming. In 1980, Wall gave up his teaching position at Corona del Mar High School and his part-time bartending gigs at local watering holes including the Swallow’s Inn in San Juan Capistrano to pursue the real cowboy life by ranching and bartending in Montana.

Eventually all those tales he’d heard during all those long honky-tonk nights crystallized into songs that caught the ear of Jerry Jeff Walker. Walker recorded three of Wall’s songs, then persuaded him to move to Austin, Tex., and become a full-time singer-songwriter.

After five years touring as Walker’s opening act, Wall may be about to come into his own. Confederate Railroad’s version of his song “Trashy Women” is featured in the upcoming Pauly Shore movie, “The Son-in-Law.”

While fame may be just around the bend for Wall, on Tuesday, before a hometown crowd his old friends and former neighbors, Wall kept his show simple.

The selections in Wall’s set, from his earliest compositions through most of the songs on his two albums to brand new material, showed his progression from disgruntled lover to inspired songwriter.

Wall’s earliest tunes were typical of the kind of whining you’d probably really hear from the guy on the next bar stool. What Wall referred to as his “first ex-wife song” included the refrain: “I’d never squander my precious love on a worthless (expletive) like you.” In another early composition, Wall sang, “Loving you is the dumbest (expletive) thing I’ve ever done.”

These early expressions of frustrations contrasted sharply with the wit and insight of Wall’s recent material, including “The End of the Rainbow Inn,” a new song Wall wrote about the demise of the American honky-tonk.