With the first annual music festival taking place just over a week ago, a new city park in the works and a fireworks display being planned for July 4^th, some Magnolia officials are calling 2009 “a year of firsts.”

Pictured, The Charlie Lucas Band performs at the Magnolia Music Festival. Photo by Justin Elbert.

“This is definitely a busy year,” Magnolia Mayor Jimmy Thornton said. “We have a lot planned.”

Thornton said the recently held music festival was a “huge success” and that the city is planning on keeping the tradition of a yearly music festival going.

The music fest was originally scheduled for September 2008, but the festival was scrapped after Hurricane Ike blew through the Gulf Coast. Organizers of the event announced shortly after that the festival would be rescheduled for this year and confirmed the top acts would still appear.

Johnny Lee, Jarrod Birmingham, Johnny Rodriguez and Aaron Watson all took the stage along with several others March 20 through 22.

“The festival went marvelously,” Thornton said. “We couldn’t have been happier with our first event.”

“This was one of the best events Magnolia has ever had,” Thornton said. “We estimate we had more than 5,000 people in attendance over the weekend. We are already planning next year’s festival.”

He also said that many of the festival’s vendors also expressed their delight in the way the festival played out.

“A lot of our vendors made a lot of money,” he said. “We made a little too.”

Thornton said that the city “deposited over $60,000” in the bank from Friday and Saturday alone.

“We still need to pay a few bills, but we definitely made a profit,” he said.

He said that the city has “some very special things planned for the money,” which the community will be notified about shortly.

Thornton said that Aaron Watson was the biggest draw for the festival.

“We estimate that there were almost 3,000 people in attendance to see Aaron,” he said.

He said the city has already found a new location to hold the festival next year. This year, the festival was held on the grounds of the Magnolia Ridge development.

“We have a location picked out in Magnolia for next year’s festival,” Thornton said. “We are going to have a few changes for next year though.”

He said that the barbeque teams would be moved to right outside the event gates to allow vendors of goods to be closer to the stage.

“We are going to meet Monday at 6 p.m. at city hall for an exiting meeting,” Thornton said. “We want everyone who came to the festival to show up Monday night. We want to know the good, bad and ugly so we can make next year’s festival even better.”

In addition to the musical acts, the festival boasted a barbecue cook-off contest, a mud volleyball tournament, horseshoe and washer tournament, a bike rally, Strong Man competition, a dunking booth and face painting.

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