Article by Amy Paige Condon

Even after a hair over 50 years of playing the blues across the globe and alongside guitar icons such as Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Chuck Berry, Robert Cray still cannot fathom that up-and-coming blues and R&B musicians look at him the way he looked at his heroes John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and Albert King.

“It’s a strange feeling. I don’t really see myself as that person,” Cray says over the phone from the road. “I think the younger generation under me, I think they’re looking at the same people that I looked at, but maybe I’d fit in there somewhere, but I don’t understand how.”

But Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, considered as the defining voice of blues for newer generations, has name-checked Cray along with Buddy Guy and Keb’ Mo as among the blues musicians who have inspired him.

The admiration is mutual.

Cray told The Musical Box blogger Walter Tunis in 2021 that Ingram, a fellow multiple Grammy Award-winning blues artist, gives him hope that the blues will carry on, and he likes the way those following in his footsteps bring their own style.

“I did a lot of emulation and added my own thing to it,” he recalls. “[Music] has to move. It has to transition. It has to change. You can talk about the different styles of blues that there’s been over the years and how it went from acoustic to electric in Chicago, then there were all these guitar slingers with T-Bone Walker, and the Texas players, Freddie King and Albert Collins…

“Then a group like ours comes out, and we start adding more R&B—we weren’t the first, Albert King was doing it when we was recording at Stax Records. Then came more rock. I have to give credit to Buddy Guy for being the inspiration to people like Jimi Hendrix, because Buddy was doing the rock version of stuff like that before anybody else in blues.”

Even when he was a high schooler back in Tacoma, Wash., Cray had a dream to be a bluesman. He first saw Albert Collins when the “Master of the Telecaster” played his high school graduation party in 1971. Five years later, Cray and his bandmates, including Richard Cousins who has been alongside him since day one, were backing Collins whenever he performed on the West Coast. They had moved to Eugene, Oregon—a college town—by then and found the geography (between Portland and San Francisco) helped raise their profile. It was a stop on the blues circuit and they developed their  chops playing with Guy, Junior Wells and others.

The Robert Cray Band has not slowed down since then, touring constantly and releasing 19 studio albums over the past five decades. 

“Nowadays, we have a big song list, and on a nightly basis, we switch it out so that we’re not playing the same thing every night. It’s how you feel,” he explains, “to keep yourself from becoming stagnant and complacent.”

Being on stage reminds him to stay in the moment. “Everything that you sing, every note that you play means something. There’s a time for silence. There’s a time to explode.”