Robert Cray’s shy stage demeanor has been well-documented in the last 40-plus years.

Still, it was disarming to hear Cray speak during a recent interview with GO! Magazine. He’s soft-spoken, thoughtful, punctuating sentences with nervous laughter — quite a contrast to his booming vocal presence and fiery guitar playing on display at Robert Cray Band shows.

Clearly, Cray is a man who prefers to let his music do the talking, and does it ever talk. Since the Robert Cray Band’s formation in 1974, the Columbus, Georgia-born guitarist has won five Grammy Awards and pushed the boundaries of rock, blues, soul and R&B across 17 studio albums. He’s shared the stage with his hero, Albert Collins, as well as a laundry list of blues and rock ’n’ roll royalty: Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Curtis Salgado and, at the last show before he died, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

In the early days of the band, Cray was happy to let longtime cohort and bassist Richard Cousins handle the stage bantering and show bookings.

“You know, Richard is a go-getter; he’s more outgoing and more aggressive,” Cray said from his home in Southern California, about a week before heading out on a short U.S. tour that will land at the Tower Theatre on Tuesday. “So in the early days he was the one that was getting the gigs, and he was also the one that was introducing the songs. I’m the total opposite of him, and I would sing them. But that was our teamwork, and so that’s how our relationship has been over the years.”

Though by no means talkative onstage, these days Cray has grown into his role as frontman.

“It’s gotten better; it’s just focus. I just focus in on what I’m doing, and that’s the only thing you can do,” he said. “And it’s a lot of fun when you’re doing that. You don’t have time to think about being shy or anything onstage. And I’m not as bad as I used to be; I chat a little bit, but I don’t chat too much. … Now I know people who have been in the business a lot longer than me, and they don’t even say a word at the microphone.”

This sense of fun can be heard — and seen — on the band’s most recent release, the album-DVD set “4 Nights of 40 Years Live.” As the title suggests, the set was recorded across four nights in four different cities on the tour behind Cray’s 17th studio album, 2014’s “In My Soul,” and celebrates the 40th anniversary of the band Cray and Cousins formed in Eugene.

The album skips bigger hits such as Cray’s 1986 breakout “Smokin’ Gun” (which does appear on a bonus live disc recorded in 1987) — as well as songs from “In My Soul” — in favor of deeper album cuts and covers such as a stomping version of Fabulous Thunderbirds’ “Wrap it Up.” The DVD augments these recent performances with clips from ’80s shows and interviews with Clapton, Richards, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmie Vaughan and Buddy Guy.

Choosing which songs to play across these four nights wasn’t an issue for Cray and the rest of the band — Cousins, drummer Les Falconer and keyboardist Dover Weinberg (a veteran of the group’s early years who returned to the fold about three years ago). That’s because Cray and company don’t think in terms of set lists in general.

“We try to do that, you know, to bring out some of the old stuff; we always try to do that at rehearsals or sound checks, to bring out different tunes if they still feel good,” Cray said. “… But what we do is, we go onstage and we don’t use a set list. And so we get onstage and we just call it. … We like to be on the edge a little bit.”

Cray and Cousins, best friends since the 1960s, grew up on the blues and R&B. The two played in numerous groups in the Northwest before forming the Robert Cray Band, eventually ending up as Collins’ backing band.

The Collins connections run deep in Cray’s history; he famously was inspired to pursue music as a career after seeing the Texas guitarist play at his high school graduation party.

“The fact is that our class voted for him to play. It was a choice between Albert Collins and a group called Crow, and Crow had had a top 40 single at that same time — well in the late ’60s, but our high school graduation party was in ’71,” Cray said. “And I had seen Albert at an outdoor show in ’69, and I guess a bunch students from my class had seen him as well. So when the vote came up, our class voted for Albert Collins, and that’s how cool that was.”

A few years later, Cray and Cousins were playing with Collins. A few more years later, Cray recorded an album with Collins and Texas guitarist Johnny Copeland, 1985’s “Showdown!”

“It was fantastic; it was kept really loose and it was a lot of fun, as you can hear on the record,” Cray said. “What was also cool about the whole thing that made it fun was that Johnny Copeland was fasting. And Albert and Johnny go back to Houston in the ’50s, they’ve known each other that long — I didn’t really know Johnny at that point, until we were doing the recording. So that’s kind of like listening to their banter and laughing at it, because Albert was just ripping Johnny, and Johnny was weak because he was fasting. And Albert was just making all kinds of fun of him, and we took that fun into the studio. It was great.”

During his Oregon years, Cray collaborated with Portland blues singer Curtis Salgado, playing together in a band called The Cray-Hawks (a portmanteau of the Robert Cray Band and Salgado’s then-current band Nighthawks).

Around this time, Cray also filmed a cameo appearance in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” as bassist in the film’s band, borrowing Cousins’ instrument (much to Cousins’ chagrin, Cray said). During filming, the film’s star, John Belushi, struck up a friendship with Salgado that led to the creation of the “Saturday Night Live” sketch Blues Brothers (and later film).

“While the filming was going on, Belushi came in one night (to a Cray-Hawks show),” Cray said. “Somebody during the break told us that John Belushi was in the audience, and we go, ‘Who’s John Belushi?’ Because we always worked on Saturday nights; we had never seen that show (‘Saturday Night Live’). So eventually he worked his way up to the stage and he did his Joe Cocker impersonation, and then we chatted with him and stuff. And that’s when Curtis and Belushi — because they were there in town for a couple months — were hanging out. And, well, you know the story. The whole thing started with Curtis schooling Belushi on the blues.”

After looking back on “4 Nights of 40 Years Live,” Cray and the band are ready to move forward. The group is set to hit the studio again in the next few months, Cray said, though he offered no hints as to how this album might turn out. As its title suggests, “In My Soul” found Cray and company leaning toward the soulful side of their music, but don’t use that for any hints of what’s to come: It wasn’t a premeditated stylistic choice.

“After the record was done was when we came up with the title,” Cray said. “We looked at the material; Steve George, our producer, goes, ‘You know, let’s call it “In My Soul.”’ I said, ‘That’s perfect.’ Yeah, so we’ll see what happens; I think that’s the best way.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com