Tennessee Two-Step

You are having lunch with Tim McGraw, the country-music superstar, at a family-style Southern-food joint in Nashville. Your observations and reflections: 1) McGraw is one of those guys who actually belong in a cowboy hat. He looks cool in a cowboy hat. If you've ever seen, say, a presidential candidate in a cowboy hat, you know this is not always an easy trick to pull off. 2) Right now McGraw is wearing a hat that his wife, the country-music superstar Faith Hill, gave him--a baseball cap with COVER GIRL written above the brim. Several fellow diners pass him by, not realizing that the man in the silly cap is in fact a very manly country-music star. It's the perfect disguise. 3) On the way out to his car, he comes to a fence, and instead of walking around to the opening, as ordinary non-studly types would do, he rests one hand on top of the barrier and swings his whole body over, as if he's in an action sequence in T.J. Hooker. It's a little thing, but muy macho. It helps you understand the screams of women at his concerts.

McGraw and Hill are, right now, the prince and princess of country music. Oh, sure, sales-wise, Garth and Shania are still the king and queen, and yes, Kelly Willis' What I Deserve is, so far, the smartest, most consistently worthwhile country CD released this year--but if you're talking young, if you're talking sexy, spunky and--how cool is this?--married, McGraw, 32, and Hill, 31, are it. They are the Tom and Nicole of today's country music (fully clothed, of course). Hill's sunny third CD, Faith (Warner Bros.), has gone double platinum and spawned the hit single This Kiss. McGraw's new album, the amiable A Place in the Sun, debuted at No. 1 on the pop chart, and is still going strong. On July 1, in Reno, Nev., McGraw will launch a new solo tour.

Young Samuel Timothy Smith didn't always seem to have the makings of a superstar, but the boy who would become Tim McGraw was country from the word go. He grew up in Start, La., a town, he says, that consisted of "a cotton gin, a couple churches and a school or two." Tim's father Horace Smith, a trucker, would take his son on runs, a load of cottonseed in the back, eight-track tapes of Johnny Paycheck and Charley Pride in the front. "By the time I was six," says McGraw, "I felt as if I knew the words to every album Merle Haggard ever recorded."

When McGraw turned 11, his life seemed to become a country song. Searching through closets to get an early gander at Christmas presents, he came across his birth certificate. He couldn't read the name listed for father, but the occupation read "baseball player." He says his mother Betty fessed up that his biological father was major-league baseball pitcher Tug McGraw. Tim struck up a cordial relationship with him and later changed his last name but still considers Smith, who raised him, his "real" father.

After an aborted stint at Northeast Louisiana University (he was prelaw), McGraw went into country music and signed with Curb Records. He fell in love with Hill while both were headliners on the aptly named Spontaneous Combustion Tour in 1995.

Hill, like McGraw, was a small towner. She worked as a McDonald's dishwasher, among other jobs, before moving from Star, Miss., to take her shot at stardom in Nashville. "You just can't be around her and not fall in love with her," says McGraw. "I just got lucky that she felt the same way." One day, before his set, McGraw asked her to marry him and then headed off to the stage. When he came back, she had written her answer on the mirror in his trailer: YES.

The couple, who have two daughters, Gracie, 2, and Maggie, 10 months, strive to keep family first. The McGraws live right outside Nashville but are on the road three months of the year. The kids travel with Hill, but both Mom and Dad constantly stop in at each other's shows to steal quality time together. A joint tour may soon be in the offing. Hill, who recently inked an endorsement deal with Cover Girl cosmetics, describes herself as "very independent," but nonetheless, offstage she prefers to go by her husband's name. Says Hill: "I really think of myself as Mrs. McGraw."

Hill and McGraw, who have recorded two hit duets, work well together. At a Faith Hill concert in New York City, McGraw kicked the show off with a bang by striding out unannounced for a solo set. "Thank you," he said, "for coming to my wife's show." In truth, this show's a family affair.