When Gretchen Wilson and Big & Rich come to the Resch Center in Ashwaubenon on Monday, it won't be your average country music concert. The two headliners have made names for themselves in their own way: Wilson for her "Redneck and proud of it" attitude and Big & Rich for their party-time vibe.

Jon Nicholson will join friends Gretchen Wilson and Big & Rich for Monday's concert at the Resch Center in Ashwaubenon. Then the real show begins.

Nicholson has set up post-concert jam sessions throughout the ?American Revolution? tour featuring members of The MuzikMafia, a collective of Nashville musicians and songwriters founded by Nicholson with friends Big Kenny and John Rich that also includes Wilson.

After Monday's concert, Nicholson will head over to Oneida Casino for a free gig that promises to turn into a trademark MuzikMafia jam, where multiple guitarists, drummers and bassists from the various backing bands fight for stage supremacy with a famous singer or two.

Nothing at the moment appears to be shutting down Nicholson, a 31-year-old Wisconsin native who released his debut CD ?A Lil Sump'm Sump'm? in September. The album comes after a decade of hanging out and making music with other Nashville misfits who, until recently, operated about as far as you can get from the country music mainstream.

Nicholson's belief in the power of music to transcend labels kept his hope for a wider audience back alive when the music industry was obsessed with finding the next Shania Twain.

Nicholson has come a long way since he was a pre-med student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he learned how to play guitar and began writing songs in the basement of his dorm. After two years of college, he moved back home to Verona just outside of Madison before heading out to Nashville in 1995.

The Pocahontas, Ill., native's debut album, ?Here for the Party,? is still in the Top 10 on Billboard's country album chart, a whopping 72 weeks after its release. Since ?Redneck Woman? turned the 32-year-old single mother into an emblem of Wal-Mart-shopping, red-state pride, slick country stars aplenty have scurried to demonstrate their blue-collar roots and prove that, underneath all that air-brushing, their necks are red, too.

But Nashville being overcome with nouveau traditionalism can also be a good thing. Lee Ann Womack, for instance, achieved her biggest commercial success with her 2000 Hallmark-card homily hit ?I Hope You Dance.? But she gave herself a Tammy Wynette makeover ? down to the stylized album cover ? on her latest, decidedly retro album, ?There's More Where That Came From,? with smashing results.

And in the cockeyed country music industry, it's the traditionalists ? bowing to the holy trinity of Merle Haggard, George Jones and Hank Williams ? who are often the rebels and outlaws that keep country's creative juices flowing.

Just as Randy Travis' breakthrough in the '80s spurred a New Traditionalist boom that launched Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and Yoakam, Wilson's out-of-nowhere success has cleared room on the charts for such straight, no-chaser acts as Bobby Pinson and Keith Anderson, who cowrote ?The Bed,? the superb ballad that was one of the strongest cuts on ?Here for the Party.? Not to mention Big & Rich, Wilson's principal partners in crime, whose anything-goes country has made them stars, along with their African-American rapper cohort, Cowboy Troy.

?Redneck Woman? was a cleverly crafted ditty (?Some people may look down on me, but I don't give a rip/I'll stand barefoot in my own front yard with a baby on my hip?) that hit the identity politics jackpot and granted her a huge audience. Sure, it was schtick, but born out of personal compulsion ? Wilson really was raised in a trailer park, and struggling to raise her young daughter.

By contrast, the title cut and first single of the new album is uninspired, and works overtime to assure Wilson's fans that she is not going soft on them.

From there, ?All Jacked Up? recovers, effectively mixing sawing fiddles and weepy steel guitars with forthright rock. It finds its footing on the ballads, with the standouts being the down-and-out ?Raining On Me,? and a closing cover of Billie Holiday's ?Good Morning Heartache? that is the album's lone curveball. In part, that's because Wilson is incapable of coming off as polished, even when singing a tune like ?One Bud Wiser? that's born to be a beer commercial.

But while that swinging honky-tonker is amusing enough, at times ?All Jacked Up? ? which was co-produced by Wilson, who co-wrote seven of its songs ? is overbearing in its relentless efforts to play to its target demographic.

Wilson salvages ?Politically Uncorrect? because she sings it, and everything else, like she means it. She doesn't have the most impressive set of pipes, but she knows how to sell a song.

She does that, and then some, on ?Full Time Job,? which beats its chest in the name of motherhood, a vocation Wilson calls ?the hardest gig I've ever known.? For that, she requests ?a little credit, where credit is due.? That's not a lot to ask, and it's well-deserved. Just not as much as it was last time around.

Country music's court jesters return for round two on the followup to their 3 million-selling ?Horse of a Different Color,? the audacious debut that shook Nashville last year.

Still, they highlight their disdain for Nashville's conservative conventions by announcing at the outset, ?Somebody's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade,? before slamming into the high-speed title song that namechecks Marilyn Manson, Cincinnati chili, moonshine and eccentric hillbilly dancer Jesco White, among other things.

What keeps the shenanigans afloat is a knack for songcraft and populist hooks big enough to catch mainstream rockers and rowdy country fans alike. Their's is an all-inclusive party that expands the guest list by breaking down walls between genres and inviting everyone to sing along.

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