“You can feel the look they give you – ‘So that’s the ONE guy in country music.’ You can feel it, that there’s this sense of hope sometimes,” said the former shoe salesman from Dallas, born Troy Coleman.

Coleman, 34, is a double anomaly in country music: not only is he black (try naming another black country artists besides Charley Pride), he’s also a rapper.

His major-label debut, Loco Motive, was released May 17 and features fiddle and banjo, but it fits more comfortably with Nelly and the Black Eyed Peas than with Toby Keith or Alan Jackson.

The first single, “I Play Chicken With The Train,” uses machine-gun beats and rhymes to defend what he calls “hick-hop”: “People said it’s impossible, not probable, too radical / But I already been on the CMA’s / hell, Tim McGraw said he like the change / Said he likes the way my hick-hop sounds / and the way the crowd screams when I stomp the ground / I’m big and black, clickety-clack …”

With his own album out now, he’s twice as busy. Coleman is on tour with Big & Rich into August, then joins country’s other chart-topping duo, Brooks & Dunn, for a three-month amphitheatre tour.

Coleman says the marriage of country and rap isn’t as far out as it might seem.

The talking-blues style of records like Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses” laid the groundwork. A few rappers have spun their lyrics over the twang of country guitars. And last year, Big & Rich, who co-produced Loco Motive, showed the possibilities of hick-hop by selling more than 2 million copies of their debut album, Horse of a Different Color.

“A lot of times the only difference is in the vernacular used to convey your thoughts and, of course, the instrumentation,” Coleman said.

If the similarities seem obvious to him, it’s because the two genres coexisted in his childhood. His parents played country music around the house when he was a kid. As he grew older he became interested in rock and rap. It all came together for him at the University of Texas, where he began performing at frat parties and clubs.

“I had my cowboy hat on and would rap over techno,” he said. “People started remembering who I was I guess because I had the cowboy hat on everywhere I went.”

It doesn’t hurt either that he’s 6-foot-5, 250 pounds. At a recent interview he wore the hat, a big silver belt buckle and boots.

But in person, he’s nothing like the party animal persona he exudes on “Loco Motive.” He has a degree in psychology, is nine credit hours short of a master’s in marketing and can speak snippets of six different languages, including Mandarin Chinese.

Coleman lent his rhymes to the Big & Rich song “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich),” and when the duo’s album took off, he left his job as a salesman at a Foot Locker store to join them on tour with Tim McGraw.