Asleep at Wheel Detours for Night at Crazy Horse : Music: The Western-swing band finishes nostalgic journey across historic Route 66 in Los Angeles, then heads for Santa Ana.

A tour along Route 66, celebrating the storied roadway’s 66th anniversary, is a nostalgic journey that Asleep at the Wheel is uniquely qualified to make.

“We recorded the song, ‘Route 66,’ three times in three different decades,” notes Ray Benson, the founder and lead singer of the long-running Western-swing band. (The group’s most recent go at the number is an in-concert rendition of the Bobby Troup tune on Asleep’s new album, “Greatest Hits Live & Kickin.’ ”) “Also, our music is derivative of the time period” when Route 66, the Chicago-to-Santa Monica trail through the West, really lived up to its nickname, ‘America’s Main Street.’

“A lot of the interest in Route 66 is a nostalgic interest, and ours is a nostalgic look at music in one respect,” Benson said by phone from his office in Austin, Tex., where he was taking a short break from Asleep’s two-week Route 66 caravan to take care of some business.

Benson, 41, said that a fan from Arizona had long suggested that Asleep at the Wheel do a tour of Route 66. With the highway’s 66th anniversary at hand, the band rounded up a corporate sponsor, Coors, and embarked on a 10-city tour of Route 66 that began May 2 in Chicago and ended Sunday at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles (Benson said that no venue was available in Santa Monica, Route 66’s actual end point). In what might be dubbed the 55 Freeway extension of the Route 66 tour, Asleep at the Wheel will also play tonightat the Crazy Horse Steak House.

Benson has his own memories of Route 66. As a small boy growing up near Philadelphia, he traveled the road during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s on family vacations. And Asleep at the Wheel has been plying Route 66 territory for more than 20 years.

But Benson, a big, deep-voiced man with a touch of an acquired Texas drawl, thought of more than quaint Americana as he retraced Route 66. The singer, who gave a slide presentation on Route 66 and its history before each performance on the tour, is well aware that memories of Route 66 are memories of a small-town way of life that is all but lost. And he’s wondering whether we can learn from past losses as we think about the shape of American mobility in the century to come.

Asleep at the Wheel’s tour stopped at 10 major cities along Route 66. The band wanted to play small towns, too, Benson said, but the economy of small-town Route 66 has been so badly eroded by the advent of superhighways that it couldn’t find any promoters willing to stage shows outside the major markets.

Asleep did pop up at the 100th anniversary celebration of one small town: Davenport, Okla., which is on the route between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. “We played ‘Route 66’ and were presented a brick from Route 66,” he said. “The original Route 66 was a brick road through town, and a dirt road outside of town.”

In Tulsa, Benson said, the band was present for ceremonies renaming a small park “Route 66 Park.” A red oak tree was planted there in Asleep at the Wheel’s honor. But Benson also came away from the ceremony with another poignant tale about modernity’s toll. Someone at the ceremony told him how he used to play baseball in that park, until a chunk of it was sacrificed to construction of Interstate 44. “That park became useless to families, because this modern interstate chopped it in half,” Benson said.

“When you travel (Route 66), it takes a lot longer,” Benson said. “You’ve got to stop at every stoplight. The interstate is much more efficient, much more safe. But you lose the interconnectedness of all these small towns. We went from dirt trails to dirt roads to railroads to hard-cap roads to interstate roads.

“I’m no visionary to say what should come next, but the next stage should be an improvement over the system we have now,” he said. “When you do have limited access highways, you kill all the points between Point A and Point B. How do we create the system of the future, with the vehicles of the future, that will solve this problem? It’s really important, because the way we get around the country defines the country.”

Since his vacation travels as a boy, Benson has had a fascination for the road. Asleep at the Wheel has always been a hard-traveling band, averaging 250 dates for most of its career (Benson says that now that he’s a father, with two small sons, he has cut back to about 180 shows a year).

“It’s my dad’s fault, I keep telling him. I got that wanderlust (as a boy). It seemed very normal to me to get out and travel,” he said. Few can match the pace he keeps. Benson said that nearly 80 musicians have played in Asleep at the Wheel over the years. “They burn out, or they get a better job somewhere else,” he said. “You don’t get rich doing this, and it takes a lot of fortitude. I’m well suited to it. I’ve given up a lot, and gotten a lot.”

As a youth, Benson began performing around Philadelphia in a folk group with his sister. At the same time, he was avidly collecting old-time records. That led him to the Western swing of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, the Kansas City jazz and blues of Count Basie and Big Joe Turner, and the jumping R & B of Louis Jordan, all of which figure in Asleep’s repertoire.

“My attraction has been to white folks playing black music and black folks playing white music,” he said. “In a segregated world, what an interesting thing it is that Bessie Smith was Bob Wills’ idol. The trading of cultural stuff from different races and nationalities is why (American music) is different from everybody else.”

Benson attended Antioch College in Ohio. In 1969, he went to live on a farm in West Virginia as a “work-study project.” Asleep at the Wheel started out on the farm as a trio in January, 1970.

“I started Asleep at the Wheel to do roots music, or what I called ‘Forgotten Music,’ ” Benson said. Early gigs included forays to Washington to open for the likes of Hot Tuna and Poco. Then the band moved to Oakland, and again, in 1973, to Austin.

“I met Willie Nelson and Doug Sahm, and they said: ‘You should go to Texas. You could work six nights a week.’ We went to the Armadillo (an Austin club), which was where all the hippies went, and we found we could also play the redneck dance halls. We cleaned up a bit by the time we got down there, and we looked like a Western band.”

Through the 1970s, Asleep at the Wheel was virtually alone in keeping Western-swing’s mix of jazz and country alive (Merle Haggard also touched on the style in his shows). But with country music’s swing toward tradition since the mid-’80s, the mainstream’s course has moved closer to the path Asleep at the Wheel has always followed. George Strait, in particular, brought the Western-swing style back before a large audience.

“George used to open for us,” Benson recalled. “He took one of my fiddle players to start his band. George was instrumental” in attuning a wider audience to the sound that Bob Wills had created in the ‘30s.

“He had great sex appeal and charisma, and that opened it up. We could get on the radio again, if not across the board, at least in some places. It doesn’t translate into huge things, but it really helps.”