Craig Fuller is performing again with Pure Prairie League after a 35-year hiatus.

If not for a city in Kansas, Pure Prairie League might never have existed.

The members of the classic country-rock act, eventually known for the hit songs “Amie” and “Let Me Love You Tonight,” were trying to come up with a name for the fledgling band in the late 1960s when the drummer happened across an airing of the 1939 film “Dodge City.” The Errol Flynn western featured a women’s temperance union called the Pure Prairie League. The name stuck.

The band will be reconnecting with Kansas after a lengthy hiatus – decades long, in fact – when Pure Prairie League makes its first appearance in Lawrence with original lead vocalist/guitarist Craig Fuller at the helm.

“It was made known to myself there was some interest in people seeing me play these nostalgic old songs,” Fuller says of the revival. “And I thought I’d let my kids know that I could do something besides make peanut butter sandwiches.”

Despite writing and singing the band’s signature tunes, Fuller actually quit the group in the early 1970s as the result of draft board problems upon being recruited by Uncle Sam for a tour of Vietnam.

“I never liked to travel anyway,” jokes Fuller from his home in North Carolina.

“When I left, the band was struggling to get work. We had been dropped by RCA. It wasn’t as if I had left some up-and-coming thing; I left some struggling thing. After I’d been gone about six months, (RCA) figured out that ‘Amie’ edited could be airplay-friendly.”

Fuller returned to music in the late ’70s with American Flyer. (Meanwhile, future Nashville star Vince Gill took over Pure Prairie League, singing its saxophone-laden soft-rock hit “Let Me Love You Tonight.”) Years after the dissolution of Flyer, Fuller was enticed by Little Feat to become its lead singer. He left in 1993 after a five-year run to spend more time with his family.

Along with The Eagles and Poco, Pure Prairie League is often credited with being one of the initial acts to bring the emerging style of country-rock to mainstream radio.

“The first guys that influenced us were The Byrds,” Fuller says. “Before The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield were sort of county-rock. Those were about the earliest things I remember after we became a unit and said, ‘What are we gonna do?'”

If he hadn’t quit in the early ’70s, how would Pure Prairie League have shaped up differently?

Fuller reflects, “That’s really hard to say. I don’t think I would have ever had a saxophone in the band. But who knows what we might have come up against?”