Blues and rock icon and five-time Grammy-winner, singer, and guitarist Robert Cray is celebrating 50 years on the road. 

At Niswonger Performing Arts Center in Van Wert on Sunday, Oct. 13, Cray and his band will play all the hits, plus songs spanning his career. 

“Obviously, you’ve got your hit records back to Strong Persuader and the albums around that,” Cray said in a phone call from his home near Santa Barbara. “We go all the way back to the Bad Influence album (1983) up into the most recent, which is called That’s What I Heard (2020).”

The show that never was

Doing research, I found Cray was the subject of the cover story in Sept. 14, 2014, issue of Whatzup. 

In the story, he gave an uplifting interview ahead of his opening show for the great B.B. King at Embassy Theatre. King was a remarkable 89 years old. But not being from around here, I didn’t know the full story.

“Well, no, that concert got cancelled. It never took place,” said Cray, sadly. “The gig the night before the Fort Wayne show was when B.B. had taken sick on stage in Chicago. And we showed up in Fort Wayne and found out after we arrived.”

That previous night turned out to be King’s last public performance. He passed away the following year. It was some time before Cray was able to play in our region again.

Working his way up

In the 1970s, Cray and band built a reputation in Oregon and San Francisco. 

He appeared in the 1978 film National Lampoon’s Animal House, playing an uncredited bass player in Otis Day’s band. As the story goes, that role led him to being involved in helping John Belushi put together The Blues Brothers, although he wasn’t in that band. 

That same year Cray befriended Stevie Ray Vaughan while playing the San Francisco Blues Festival. 

Cray broke out in Europe with a series of albums on smaller blues labels, leading to his 1985 all-star album Showdown! on an equal billing with the great Albert Collins and Johnny Clyde Copeland. 

Cray’s breakthrough in the U.S. was 1986’s multi-platinum Strong Persuader, which launched him into the MTV era with hits including “Smoking Gun” and “Right Next Door.”

Rubbing shoulders with the greats

Cray is a fine guitarist with a crisp, clean single-note lead style that recalls his forebears. But make no mistake, the draw is his clear tenor singing voice and aching believability when he gets soulful and introspective on songs about infidelity, guilt, and regret. That’s what made Strong Persuader one of the greatest blues albums of the ’80s. It turbo-charged his career.

“We had been around for a while, but we were in a spot when the radio and MTV and everybody decided they wanted to have this music on the major airwaves,” he said. “And so we were happy to get it. That was great.”

He also credits his longtime collaborator, co-producer, and songwriter Dennis Walker, who passed away in 2022.

In 1987, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones was musical director of a concert film and documentary on the occasion of the 60th birthday of rock n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll. Richards recruited Cray to be a guitarist in the house band. Cray put himself forward and sang lead on Berry’s 1956 hit “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” just the perfect song for Cray.

“I picked that song out because my dad used to play that record a lot,” Cray proudly said. 

On that gig Cray met rock drummer Steve Jordan, who became Cray’s record producer for his most recent albums in the 21st century. Jordan recently took over the drum roster for The Rolling Stones when Charlie Watts passed away in 2021. 

“Just talked to Steve yesterday,” Cray said. “We’re good buddies.”

Cray enjoyed his role as a transitional figure, bridging the first generation of Chicago electric bluesmen and the British blues gods into the younger generation that emerged in the ’90s. 

A favorite of Eric Clapton, Cray opened for Clapton’s Journeyman tours. 

Cray got to record and perform with Tina Turner, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, and more. 

On a fateful night in 1990 at a festival in Wisconsin, Cray performed a 1 a.m. encore with Clapton, Buddy Guy, and Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Hours later, Stevie Ray and several others died in a helicopter crash.

A Musician’s tool

For guitarists and rockers like myself, the most notable Cray artifact is his Robert Cray Signature Fender Stratocaster guitar, which debuted in 1988 and is still in production.

“We based it on two guitars that I had at the time,” Cray said. “One was a ’64 Fender Strat, in Inca silver, and another one was my ’58 sunburst, maple-neck Stratocaster. Hardtails. Actually, the ’64 had a vibrato. But I never used the vibrato on the guitar, so we made them all hardtails. And then it was a combination of figuring out the radius of the neck, and the pickups.

“We’ve been together for a long time now,” he said of his relationship with Fender. 

Cray is one of their longest-running endorsers, right there Eric Clapton, whose own signature model came out the same year.

Cray’s band is Dover Weinberg on piano and organ, George Sluppick on drums, and bass player Richard Cousins, whom Cray has known and played with since they met in high school.

“Richard and I started the band in 1974,” he said.

These hard-working blues statesmen don’t do weekend fly dates; they perform 80-100 shows a year and tour three weeks at a time. 

Every spring or summer they play festivals in Europe; last summer they did a stint opening for The Doobie Brothers. 

On this leg, they’re headlining, starting in St. Louis and heading up east to Boston. 

The blues takes dedication. 

“We’re not the weekend warriors,” Cray said with a chuckle.