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Ray Benson.

Article Excerpt
Let's do the most important question first: How tall are you, actually?

I was six seven, but now I'm six six and a half. I shrunk.

Who can tell?

When I put on my cowboy hat and boots, I'm seven feet tall. That's what really matters.

Practically speaking, has your height ever been an issue for you?

Absolutely. I did a movie of the week with Dolly Parton in 1991 called Wild Texas Wind. She's five feet tall. They had a problem shooting us--you know, dig a hole for Ray or put Dolly on a box.

Is it ever a problem for you from a music standpoint?

Just hitting my head onstage.

Were you tall as a kid?

Yeah. I was a starting basketball player at a fancy Philadelphia prep school where most cowboy singers come from. I quit my senior year because I had broken four fingers and two thumbs--it was killing my guitar playing.

Music was more important to you back then.

I had been playing professionally since I was eleven. My sister and I had a folk group, the Four G's. We played with the Philadelphia Orchestra. They had young people's concerts, and they said, "Hey, folk musics happening!"

This would have been in ...?

Nineteen sixty-one. We did "This Land Is Your Land" and "On Top of Old Smokey"--those kinds of songs.

Who taught you to play?

I taught myself. My sister was taking guitar lessons, and she brought home this baritone ukulele--it's a four-string guitar, basically. I picked it up. I played the song from the Ballantine beer commercial because it was on during the Phillies game.

Are you still learning after all these years?

Absolutely. I practice. I'm a personality and a singer--that's how I make my living--but I'm always a guitar player.

You make your living as a personality?

My friend J. J. Cale once told me, "I was a really good guitar player, the best guitar player in Tulsa, and I was making two hundred bucks a week. Then I wrote my first song, for either Eric Clapton or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and my first royalty check was twenty-five grand or fifty grand. After that, every time I went to practice, I said, 'I'm going to write a song.'" You have to be more than a guitar player. And when you recognize it, you go, "Okay, I can be that guy." So...

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