Johnny Bush, the "Country Caruso," who turns 70 in February, says that the biggest difference between old time country music and modern country pop is the material. Bush is one of those people who know that good art of any kind comes, at some level, from the heart and soul of the artist, not from the results of marketing surveys.

Bush, who released his latest, "Honkytonic," in September on the independent BGM Texas label, expresses himself in no uncertain terms about that theory, and, in his fifth decade of musical tributes and tribulations, expresses it with the kind of experience that wins respect from independent artists.

Independents are the ones who, from time to time, write and sing songs from the heart and soul, but who never seem to get much, if any, airplay.

"You don't hear new songs on radio like 'Your Cheatin' Heart' or 'Crazy Arms' or 'Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away' because it's all been homogenized by these young producers," Bush says of the formula chasers looking in the wrong place for that one big hit. "You can't say anything bad about the woman. You can't say anything about God. You can't say anything derogatory. They want happy, positive songs. But country music is about real life, and when you stop writing about real life, you miss the boat."

Bush, a church-going man who still believes in honky tonk songs, gets downright adamant about some of the music and practices he's heard in recent years.

"'She Thinks My Tractor is Sexy" is bullshit," he says of the Kenny Chesney hit. "Record sales are at an all-time low. The (mainstream) songs aren't as good, and it's all about the song. Sometimes they say it's too country. What the hell does that mean?"

Bush complained, too, about talent scouts, producers and big label executives who used to look for different-sounding voices, but now seek sound-alikes.

"That started with the success of George Strait and then Garth Brooks, and all these clones started falling into place," he says. "Today, in mainstream music, the artists are almost like puppets."

Bush mentioned an article from the Nashville Banner quoting one unnamed producer as saying he didn't care how good somebody could sing or how good he or she could write. "Show me what they look like," the producer said. "We can market that. And when we burn them up, we'll spit them out and find somebody else."

Bush could have disappeared himself back in 1972. Newly signed by Chet Atkins to RCA Records, his first single, "Whiskey River," was on the verge of being a hit and filling up big clubs with his band. In just a few short months, he lost the ability to hit the high notes which had come so easy during 20 years of working with Ray Price and Willie Nelson and doing his own thing. It felt as if his throat was being choked off, and he was afraid.

He lost half the range in his voice, and sometimes couldn't speak at all. RCA dropped him. In 1978, doctors finally diagnosed his problem as the neurological condition spasmodic dysphonia, which puts the vocal cords into uncontrollable spasms.

Concert bookings dropped sharply, but Bush developed some tricks and kept performing through his fear, depression and Valium addiction. It helped a lot when Willie Nelson recorded "Whiskey River" several times in those early years. The royalty checks mattered.

'"I never stopped performing because I owed too much money to too many people," he says. "When it first happened, I didn't know what it was, and I thought it would leave as quick as it came on. It didn't, and it never will."

It wasn't until 1985 that a speech therapist, Gary Catona, developed radical exercise techniques that helped Bush reclaim a large part of his singing range and some limited speech.

In 1994, Bush recorded "Time Changes Everything," a western swing CD, at Nelson's studio. Since 1998, he's released a series of albums including the recent "Honkytonic," a collection of shuffles, drinking songs, give-up-drinking songs and broken-heart ballads like much of his previous work.In 2002, Dr. Blake Simpson began injecting small amounts of Botox into Bush's vocal cords every eight weeks to restore almost full singing range.

The newer CDs introduced Bush to generations of younger (which includes a whole range of ages), independent Texas singer-songwriters. Four of them - Tommy Alverson, Kevin Fowler, Stephanie Urbina Jones and Matt Martindale of Cooder Graw - duet with Bush on Honkytonic, as does Nelson on either the 22nd or 23rd version (no one seems to be sure) of "Whiskey River."

"I didn't even think they'd know who I was," Bush says of the four new collaborators, "but they wanted to be part of this album. I thought that was really cool. It exposes me to the younger audience and gives them a chance to be exposed to the traditional audiences."

Urbina Jones says when she was a child, her parents would drive "for hours" to hear Bush, bringing her along.

"When you talk about great songs, great voice and country music, I have always thought of Johnny Bush," Urbina Jones says. "His music has touched many generations, and I consider it a highlight in my life to have sung a duet with this country legend."

Alverson says he's been a Johnny Bush fan for as long as he can remember.

"The 4-4 shuffles are what interested me most in his music and later in the songwriting," Alverson says. "It really gives me energy to keep it up just hanging around him. He's become a great friend in the past three or four years...Just an honest to God great human being! I love Johnny Bush!"Austin musician Cornell Hurd has recorded extensively with Bush and credited Bush in the liner notes of at least two of his own CDs as the reason he moved to Texas.

"Many of us here feel that Johnny Bush is the greatest of all the Texas honky-tonk singers," Hurd says. "His vocal elegance, his heroic sound and his unbelievably powerful recordings make him instantly recognizable. As a songwriter, he is an absolute class act. As a man and a friend, he's the best."

Bush has also recorded with Dale Watson and Cornell Hurd on their CDs, and performed with Pat Green, Cross Canadian Ragweed and others.

Bush is also working with CCR's Cody Canada on a song called "I Want a Drink of That Water That the Man Turned Into Wine," based on the old T. Graham Brown song about turning the wine back into water.

In addition to Nelson, Bush also worked on the CD with old friends including versatile Bobby Flores and producer-engineer Bill Green, who owns the San Antonio-based BGM Music and who in the 1970s played bass and fronted for Bush.

"Bobby used to work in my band, like most of the other musicians in Texas. The epitome of the honky tonk, Ray Price-sounding fiddler was Tommy Jackson, who passed away back in the early '80s," Bush says. "He was the inventor of this fiddle style. Bobby is the only man who does it where you can't hardly tell the difference, and he loves the sound."

Bush is just as loyal to honky tonk songs as he is to old friends, because the songs are microcosms of the human heart and soul.

"The honky tonk is a place where somebody goes to forget someone, and the best way to do that is to find somebody else," he says. "That may be a little corny way of looking at it, but when the divorce rate is 50 percent, then half of that 50 percent is hurting. That hasn't changed much over the years. Maybe that's gotten worse."

Bush pretty much sticks with the medium-tempo, shuffle-beat songs with twin fiddles and steel guitar. And he's not real particular whether it's one of his own songs like "Whiskey River" or somebody else's like the barstool anthem "Green Snakes on the Ceiling."

"A song has to mean something to me in a way that when I hear it, if it's something I didn't write myself, it wakes up something in my mind," Bush says. "I want to convey that feeling to the listener."

For example, he says, his cover of "What Made Milwaukee Famous (made a loser out of me)" has a positive message. And, "I think Hank Williams was preaching to all of us when he sang 'your cheating heart will make you weep.' If you do bad, you're going to get hurt."

Bush was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in 2003 along with Kris Kristofferson and Lefty Frizzell.

His biography, "Whiskey River, Take My Mind," written by long-time music critic Rick Mitchell, is at the publisher now awaiting publication date. Bush calls it the story of his life - from his beginnings as a singer-guitarist in 1952 in San Antonio to his stints as a drummer with Price, Nelson and others - and the true story of the Texas honky tonk.

Bush began playing honky tonks as a wide-eyed 18 year old, back when they were part of the "chicken-wire circuit" because club owners would put chicken-wire fences in front of the stages to keep the band from being bombarded by beer bottles."Years ago, a honky tonk was a bad place to be, on the outskirts of town, built of tar paper and old boxes. It had a jukebox, and it was a place where people would go to drink. When you mix alcohol with somebody who has a bad case of the blues, that leads to a volatile situation and that would lead to fights or even murder."

"Once at the Harbor Lights in Houston, a stevedore got into a fight, knocked the other guy out, went into kitchen and got a cleaver, and came back and chopped the guy's head off.

"Today, the word honky tonk is chic. It's in. The people who use the word have no idea because, over the years, they have changed. Thank God for that."

Bush believes traditional country and its legitimate offspring - where the material remains strong, but too often unheard - will survive today's blind-sided marketing approach because of satellite radio and the streaming broadcasts.

"People are tired of mainstream radio playing the same 15 songs over and over, and a lot of the Americana and Texas music stations are putting the hurt on those other stations," he says.