At the Country Radio Seminar earlier this month in Nashville, Darius Rucker accepted a gold plaque for his debut country album, "Learn to Live."

"You have given me a new career and a new life, and I can't thank you enough," Rucker told the audience.

With that humble expression of gratitude, Rucker raised a question:

What was wrong with his old career / life?

As lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, Rucker reached levels of fame and fortune that most musicians dream about, but never achieve. The band's debut disc, "Cracked Rear View," went platinum 16 times. Though hits have been scarce since, Rucker, 42, could have played a few charity shows a year with the Blowfish to quench his thirst for performing and retired to the golf course to work on his mid-range irons.

Instead, he walked away from his band (which he says has not broken up), reinvented himself as a country performer and put out a critically-acclaimed album and played a bunch of shows with Braid Paisley and Dierks Bentley.

Sunday afternoon, Rucker will perform a post-game concert after the Admirals square off against Hamilton at the Bradley Center. Faceoff is 4 p.m.

"This is a big show for us," said Admirals president Jon Greenberg, whose team has welcomed the BoDeans and Phil Vassar already this season and will host Styx on March 28.

"Darius Rucker has emerged as a top-selling country act. He's already had a No. 1 hit from this CD ("Don't Think I Don't Think About It") and could have another ("It Won't Be Like This For Long")."

While some in the industry have been surprised at Rucker's crossover success, not to mention the fact that he is the first African-American to hit the country charts since Charlie Pride in 1988, it has been a natural move for Rucker, who says he grew up watching "Hee Haw" and tried to convince his Hootie and the Blowfish bandmates into moving in a twangier direction.

Once he began collaborating with Nashville writers and musicians, Rucker found the atmosphere inspiring.

"I used to only write when I was 'inspired,' and now I know that was a crock," Rucker told The Lafayette Journal And Courier, of Indiana. "I'd never co-written with anyone before. I've learned so much from these Nashville guys, and now I write all the time. I love it. I've already started to write the next record."

Though the music industry has felt the impact of the economic recession, Rucker's outlook on the business was depressed before the Dow took a dive.

"In 1999, I was in the back of the bus and told the guys I wasn't ever going to listen to new music again. I was done," Rucker told the newspaper. "For about five or six years, I was only listening to CDs and talk radio. I started listening to the radio again in 2005 and now I hear so many great songs."

Rucker used to experience music as a record store employee, but he told Country Music Television that the store where he once worked -- Sounds Familiar -- no longer exists.

"I was going to see if there were people that I know there -- and it's not there anymore," he said. "The store's gone. You just go, 'Wow.' Record stores are going by the wayside. It's sad. I remember when I worked retail, you had those people that came and hung out and listened to music. You would play them something that they never heard before and they'd buy it.

"That was a great time to play something and have somebody come buy it. That was such a cool feeling. The way that I discovered so many records was by somebody in the store playing it. That's how I discovered Nanci Griffith. I walked in the store and somebody was playing 'Once in a Very Blue Moon.'"

Rucker, who recently played at an REM tribute show in New York, will open dates for Rascal Flatts this summer.