Fifty-five years. That’s how long singer, songwriter, guitarist and bandleader Ray Benson has been fronting Asleep At The Wheel, which performs April 19 at Charleston Music Hall.
For 55 years, Benson and his band have put the “W” back in “Country & Western,” playing Western swing, the up-tempo, fiddle-and-pedal-steel spiked dance music that artists like George Strait and Merle Haggard occasionally employed, though never as much as Asleep At The Wheel.
There were influences other than Western swing in the band’s music, of course, most notably honky-tonk dustups and Cajun hoedowns, but by the 2000s, Benson was a towering figure in Western swing music, literally and figuratively (he’s 6-foot-7).
He brought a genre back to the mainstream with Top Ten hits like “The Letter That Johnny Walker Read” and best-selling albums like Texas Gold. And his band has won 10 Grammy awards along the way.
With the legendary band’s latest tour called “Happy Trails,” some might think the name indicates the end of the line after 55 years for the band and the 74-year-old Benson. And that it might stop recording, too.
“Neither,” Benson said with a chuckle during a recent Charleston City Paper interview. “Essentially we have a five-year plan, and we’re in year two of that. We’ll continue the tour and try to hit all the markets and places that we love and who actually like us. So I would say there’s another three years of touring, before we call it quits.”
And it won’t really be over then, either. Benson doesn’t want to stop making music, he said he’s just getting a little too old for all of the touring.
“My voice is great, and my guitar playing is great,” he said, “but my back and all those things deteriorate, which makes it hard to tour. And also the touring landscape is so different now. In the beginning, I used to jump on a bus, I would drive and we’d get on the road and stay out for weeks at a time. But the economics just don’t work anymore. It costs a fortune to do what we used to do on a shoestring.”
So after the Happy Trails tour is over, Benson plans on occasional shows, a lot of virtual content for Asleep At The Wheel’s devoted fanbase, a new album every now and then, and that’s about it.
“We’ll always do studio stuff and virtual stuff,” he said. “That’s the thing: The pandemic showed us that there are other ways to reach people.”
It felt reasonable to ask Benson if he’d been thinking about Asleep At The Wheel’s legacy as it winds down years on the road. After all, Benson is one of the people who kept the music of pioneers like Bob Wills alive while country went pop in the ’70s and ’80s.
In fact, he has been thinking about it, specifically about the more than 100 musicians who have come through the band over five decades.
“That’s what it’s all about, is these incredible musicians,” he said. “Folks who have gone through Asleep At The Wheel have gone on to pretty amazing careers. Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan’s bass player, was with me for six years. Larry Franklin, the number one session fiddler in Nashville, was with me for three years. (Guitarist and pedal-steel player) Junior Brown was in the band and has a career of his own. So that legacy is really something.”
After a lot of ups and downs in the 1980s (the band didn’t have a record label for five years, and at one point they were pressured to record a cover of Rupert Holmes “The Pina Colada Song,”), new traditional country artists like Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and Rosanne Cash helped revive true country and western music and Asleep At The Wheel’s career, allowing them to keep doing what they do best.
And for Benson, that means playing the music that he desperately wanted to bring back to people’s attention to back in 1969: Good old Western swing.
“When nobody else was doing it, we did it,” he said. “It was music that had disappeared from the landscape and we were able to bring it back to the forefront.”
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