Even for a country singer, Allison Moorer’s life is filled with more than enough tragic material.

When she was 14, the singer’s father shot and killed her mother, then himself. The orphaned Moorer was then raised by her older sister, Shelby Lynne, who went on to pursue a career as a country crooner herself.

The 30-year-old has since learned to value her independent streak.

“I have no fear about following whatever path I feel like I need to follow,” she said.

The alt-country singer’s path from rural Alabama to Nashville has led to her latest album, “Miss Fortune,” which builds on her country roots to explore fresh pop-folk influences.

The singer-songwriter began a national tour this past Friday and comes to the Mercury Lounge Wednesday.

Moorer doesn’t like to talk about her family tragedy, but you can hear strains of it in her music.

On the final track on her new album, she sings, “I drink the bottle empty, just like my poor daddy did . . . no one grows old in this household, we are a dying breed.”

But “Miss Fortune,” her third and latest album, has as much light on it as darkness, and it mixes twanging saloon songs with fresh pop tunes.

“One of the things that sets this album apart from my two previous records is I think the songwriting has definitely progressed,” she said. “The variety on this record makes it different.”

She’s made it big in the country-music capital, but Moorer never got caught up in the Nashville hit machine that, she says, packages new artists from top to bottom and choreographs their every move.

“They’re told, ‘If you cut these songs, you’ll have a radio hit,’ ” she said. “Which is, frankly, bulls- – -, because nobody knows what a hit is.”

When the singer arrived in Nashville, she dreamed only of becoming a professional backup singer. “I really had no intentions of a solo career,” she said.

“The music business isn’t fit for human beings, frankly.”

But when her boyfriend, Butch Primm, a musician from Oklahoma, heard her sing, he said, “You really should be doing your own thing.”

The two started writing songs together – and got married – and it wasn’t long before Moorer was spotted at a gig and introduced to Tony Brown, president of MCA Nashville.

She signed a deal in 1997, and when Brown moved to the Universal South label, she went with him.

“He really believed in what I was doing as an artist and didn’t want to change me,” she said.

The big break came when Moorer’s song, “A Soft Place to Fall,” was picked by Robert Redford for the soundtrack of his film “The Horse Whisperer.”

It received a 1999 Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, and Moorer performed it live at the awards ceremony.

Her debut album, “Alabama Song,” came hot on the heels of the nomination, and she followed it up with “The Hardest Part” in 2000.

Moorer was raised on the traditional country music her parents loved – “that’s kind of in my bones” – but she began to explore new kinds of music when her husband introduced her to emerging alt-country singers like Lucinda Williams.

Now, she said, “I listen to a lot of different music, as most musicians do. Anything I can get my hands on that’s got soul to it.”

“Miss Fortune” is as free-spirited as its creator, liberally mixing neo-traditional country music and pop influences.

The national tour winds up at the end of September, and then Moorer heads back to the U.K., where she’s just finished a club tour.

“After I tour, who knows?” she said. “I’m not one of those make-plans people.”