Blues legend Bland plays Crosby Saturday

Bobby "Blue" Bland

CROSBY – This largest concert festival in the history of this area returns to the Rock n’ C Arena as the Budweiser Southern Blues Festival on Saturday, May 7.

According to Debora Delasbour, “Ah, at last our true love has come along – the Blues.
The matriarch of all music that stirs the soul. It can transcend you … to the past and present … take you from tears to laughter … reminiscing on love lost and found … feelings of joy and pain… It takes you home, to the hole in the wall and why it can even take you to church!
No other music can take you on such a ride! Its sound and effect on the human spirit is universal because the blues evokes emotions of life’s experiences. It’s your soul crying out to be heard! And if you want to travel that emotional rollercoaster for the ride of your life there is no grander destination than
The Budweiser Southern Blues Festival at the Crosby Fairgrounds in Crosby, Texas! The Budweiser Southern Blues Festival is ‘Reloaded’ and welcomes you to attend so your soul can be released. Saturday, May 7, 2005, at 14920 Crosby-Lynchburg Road at the Crosby Fairgrounds in Crosby, Texas, is the baptismal day for the deliverance of a good time for twelve hours! The gates open at 12 noon, the show starts at 1:00 pm and ends at midnight.”

Tickets for adults are $23.00 and can be purchased at any Ticket Master location as well as at the gate on the day of the show. Tickets for children eleven years and under are $10.00 and can only be purchased at the gate. Parking is $4.00; RV parking is $10.00 and please be advised there are no hook-ups for your RV.

This festival, held the first Saturday in May, kicks off the vast celebrations that the month brings followed by Mother’s Day, the end of the school year, graduations and the best of all the beginning of summer.

May is the ultimate party month and there is no place better to get in the groove then the Crosby Fairgrounds! And speaking of Mother’s Day, the festival falls on that weekend and in honor of those ladies, a few will walk away with some great door prizes if they hold the lucky ticket.

Door prizes range from gift certificates to beautiful gift baskets to the grandest of them all: a trip for two. The Budweiser Southern Blues Festival offers a taste of the best.

Not only will you receive the traditional down home blues you are so accustomed to but also a taste of its offspring Southern Soul! Southern Soul is genetically flavored with more R&B providing that extra spice to those familiar chords distinctively known to the blues. The sound is fresh and yet familiar while honoring its blues heritage but more importantly Southern Soul is creating a legacy of its own.

Robert Calvin Bland is the renowned Bobby “Blue” Bland. Baby Boomers recognize as the author of many of the songs sung by English rockers. The 1997 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner is a genuine influence on much of the music that was written in the 1970s and still bears heavily in the new century.

The 1992 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s songs of the ’50s and ’60s hits have been rerecorded by artists throughout the musical spectrum.

If anyone recognizes the titles, “Turn on Your Love Light,” “I Pity the Fool,” then they probably thought “That’s The Way Love Is” was a Country song. As his Blues sounds became popular in many genre he switched briefly to a defined Jazz style. “St. James Infirmary” or “Stormy Monday” helped established a distinctive tone in the American psyche.

Tickets are on sale at the gates at 11:00 a.m. or call (281) 471-5060 or visit the festival website: www.atbe.net