Would George Strait Ever Do a Club Tour?

George Strait accepts the award for "Single Record of the Year" onstage during the 42nd Annual Academy Of Country Music Awards held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 15, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

May 16, 2008 — George Strait has gotten used to playing for big audiences. He recently finished a tour that had him playing to 10,000 or more people nightly, and not that many years ago, he had an annual stadium tour that frequently had crowds of 40,000-50,000 people.

Those kinds of dates pull in good money, but the artist has to sacrifice intimacy with the audience, and George misses that. His "Shiftwork" buddy Kenny Chesney has a similar attitude that’s led Kenny to put on his annual Keg In The Closet Tour of small clubs in the southeast. Whether or not George ever heads in that direction, playing the Texas dancehalls again is an idea that has some appeal to him.

"I played them for so long that I was ready to move on, but it would be cool to go back and play some of them again," he says. "We had a lot of great times in those old dancehalls, and that’s where I kind of cut my teeth and learned how to get up on stage and play in front of people. There’s a little bit of me that misses some of that. I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again, but it’d be something interesting to think about."

It’s a bigger audience that George will have on his mind on Sunday when he and Kenny perform "Shiftwork" together on the 43rd annual Academy of Country Music Awards from Las Vegas. Both George and Kenny are nominated for Entertainer of the Year, along with Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban. If George should win, it’ll be a very nice present: It comes the same day as his 56th birthday.