O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Skaggs Gig: A Nice to Remember : The sincere, likable artist leads his Kentucky Thunder through a Crazy Horse show featuring hot bluegrass, country and gospel and touches of rock and swing.

SANTA ANA —  Ever notice the resemblance between Ricky Skaggs and Jay Leno? It’s not just the wide open smiles, the sparkling innocence in their eyes or those prominent chins. It extends to their genteel humor, and to the way both make their acts seem like such natural extensions of down-home personalities. All the years of craft and honing that went into them virtually vanish into the night.

Skaggs further showed, during his first encore number Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, that like Leno throwing a barb at the President, he too can dig at a sacrosanct target and get away with it. Introducing the James Taylor-esque lullaby “Give Us a Happy Home” from his new album, Skaggs hummed a few bars of Sweet Baby James’ feather-brained ode to his guitar and muttered: “What could he have been thinking about when he wrote that?”

Outside of Leno, it’s hard to think of many performers as sincerely likable, and as likably sincere, as this 37-year-old from eastern Kentucky. During his early set Monday, his first of two nights at the club, Skaggs told stories about his family and friends, talked about his 2-year-old’s drumming in his latest video, fessed up to his own shortcomings as a dad and repeatedly preached his Christian faith, in words and music. Almost all of it came across without sounding treacly or precious.

Chalk that minor miracle up to musical skill that works like the strings on a marionette: Without such supports, the whole thing crumples to the stage. Skaggs and his eight-man Kentucky Thunder band kept things on their toes throughout their 95-minute set with blistering bluegrass, country and gospel and touches of rock and swing for extra spirit. Their reading of Guy Clark’s “Heartbroke” was so blithely bouncy it would have put a smile on a basset hound.

Another vital part of Skaggs’ formula is his high, sweet tenor voice. He never bowls you over with drama--material with the most dramatic lyrics tends to be the least successful--but he imbues most of his songs with an engaging Everyguy quality.

Pronouncing his new album, “My Father’s Son,” to be “the best thing I’ve ever done,” he nonetheless waited till halfway through the set to delve into the new material.

In the album’s blazing first single, “Life’s Too Long (to Live Like This),” Skaggs reveals that even for someone who wears his soul on his sleeve as unashamedly as he does, traffic and other frustrations of daily life get on his nerves, too. It provided a healthy temporal counterbalance to the song that followed, the too-predictable “Father Knows Best,” which began as a tale about an earthly father and turned into a maudlin allegory about the Heavenly Father--to no listener’s great surprise.

Despite a couple of other songs that were slightly less than divine, Skaggs most eloquently put across his main message--about focusing on simple pleasures and enduring values. Then again, he had not only his own dazzling work on acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, fiddle and Mandocaster (an electric mandolin) to help carry the sermon past the brain and directly to the heart, but crack support from his band, especially the astonishing flat-picking of 20-year-old lead guitarist Keith Sewell.

Bassist Jason Sellers and drummer Keith Edwards formed a particularly adept rhythm section; Sellers’ ascending-descending lines on “Life’s Too Long . . . “ turned what easily could have been a race down a superhighway into a riveting tour down a winding country road.

As pinups go, Skaggs is hardly as textbook handsome as George Strait, as huggable as Randy Travis or as kinetic as Garth Brooks. But in the talent department, where it counts, guys like Skaggs and Jay Leno are proof that nice guys don’t always finish last.