EUGENE — Family and friends will shower him with gifts and good wishes on his 88th birthday, but James Payne intends to give as good as he gets: His get-together will double as a CD release party, with copies of “Old Cowhand” as the party favors.

His voice is suitably gravelly as he sings the tongue-in-cheek title song — he grew up on a farm, but he wasn’t a real cowboy — but it’s husky with real love as he sings “That Little Girl of Mine” in honor of his own daughters, Charlotte and Valerie, and his twang ranks with the likes of Marty Robbins and Hank Williams on the final track, “Cool Water.”

In fact, Payne has a peripheral connection with the renowned Williams, who died from a combination of alcohol and the morphine he took for a back injury. He died on New Year’s Day 1953, at age 29. Both Payne and Williams were born in Alabama, Payne in 1922 in Sandy Ridge and Williams the next year in Mount Olive.

They never met, “but my brother was a firefighter in Montgomery, and when Hank Williams was really young, he used to come around and shine people’s shoes,” Payne said. “He would have a little guitar on his back, and people would say, “C’mon, Hank, play us a tune.”

Payne sang and played guitar, too, but mostly with his family. The cover photo on his CD shows him as a teenager, wearing a cowboy hat and neckerchief, sitting on a steer and strumming a guitar.

After his parents died within days of each other when he was 16, Payne decided to leave Alabama.

“I was the baby of a generation, and I wanted to see the country, so I joined the Civilian Conservation Corps,” he said. “I landed in Junction City, and my first CCC camp was in Triangle Lake.”

He did roadwork, felled trees and put in a lot of telephone lines. After a couple of years, “the CCC camps started folding up, but they still had one in Cottage Grove, and I ended up there.”

That’s where he met Pauline Willis. According to family lore, “Dad won Mom’s heart playing guitar and singing to her,” said their son, Ed Payne, of Bend.

Pauline Payne remembers going to the movies every Saturday night “with my sister and our girlfriend, Ruth.”

“There were CCC boys all over town, and we were three girls and a bunch of young men,” she said. “We eventually decided we should be friendly with some of them — and he was really cute.”

Soon after their marriage, “Uncle Sam called him — it was 1942,” she said, and Payne shipped out to Southeast Asia with the U.S. Army, 96 Signal Battalion, Company C. He strung line there, too, helping create what then was the longest continuous telephone line in the world, running from Delhi, India, to Kao-ming, China.

When he returned, he got a job with the contractor husband of one of her students. Payne worked “on a power gang,” using his CCC and Army experience to string lines to new houses in the Cottage Grove area.

Soon after, he went to work for Bell Telephone, where he stayed 30 years until he retired. All that time, “I liked to sing and play my guitar,” Payne said. A dark brown Martin guitar — the one he’s had almost as long as he’s been married to Pauline — still sits on its stand in the couple’s living room at the Middlefield Oaks retirement facility in Cottage Grove.

“She gave it to me for Christmas in 1945,” Payne said. “It’s a family heirloom.”

Ed Payne remembers a house filled with music as he grew up.

“Mom, both sisters and my older brother (Kenneth), now deceased, all played piano and sang some, with Dad and me playing guitars and leading the singing,” he said. “Family and friends’ gatherings almost always included live music by my family and others.”

The idea of his father lending his voice to a CD of the country-western songs of his youth began to germinate after the elder Payne suffered an aortic aneurysm two years ago.

After surgery, three weeks in intensive care and more time in a rehabilitation unit, “my sisters and I made the tough decision to move our parents from their home of 56 years, three miles west of Cottage Grove, into a beautiful retirement center in town,” Ed Payne said.

Once settled in, James Payne decided to borrow a cassette tape recorder, with the idea of committing his life history — and his favorite jokes — to posterity. Soon, though, the stories and quips turned to the songs he’d loved to sing in his youth and young adulthood.

Becoming a recording artist had its ups and downs, though. “I’d be singing a song, and the clock would start striking, so I’d have to start over again,” Payne said. “Then I’d be singing again, and there would be a knock at the door. This was all new to me.”