Luke Bryan and his fellow South Georgia country boys gave South Georgia fans everything they wanted and more Thursday night at the Coffee Weed Plantation on Ousley Road.

Bryan, who hosted his 2011 Farm Tour to the area for the second year in a row, brought not only Valdosta native Rhett Akins and Albany native Dallas Davidson, two of country music’s hottest songwriters right now, he also had another local boy open the show.

Fans began lining up outside to tailgate and park around 1:30 p.m. Thursday, coming from the likes of South Florida and as far away as New York and Texas. An estimated 7,000 fans showed up for the show, almost three times as many as last year.

Quitman native Ben Wells opened the show at 7 p.m. with a variety of original songs including one that is being played on the radio right now called “Valdosta Rain.” After Wells left the stage, the Tim Miller Band, with members from Tifton, played a few songs before two more South Georgia boys arrived.

Akins and Davidson, a part of the Peach Pickers songwriting trio, took the stage after 8 p.m. and the crowd went wild, especially for Akins who hasn’t made a local appearance in a while.

They performed some of the hits they’ve written, such as Brooks and Dunn’s “Put a Girl in It,” Blake Shelton’s “All About Tonight,” and Trace Adkins “Honky Tonk Bondadonk.”

Akins talked to the audience about the importance of farms and how even though he went to high school at Lowndes High and was a Viking, he grew up on a farm in Brooks County and how traveling the back roads as a teenager inspired his latest number one single, “Take a Back Road” by Rodney Atkins.

Davidson went into performing “Just A Kiss,” one of his latest hits with Lady Antebellum. His wife, Sarah Davidson, a Valdosta native, joined him on stage to perform with Akins on backup.

After Akins performed “Honey Bee,” a song he wrote for Blake Shelton, both he and Davidson went into one of the first songs they wrote together, “Kiss My Country A–,” which Akins originally released himself, but Shelton re-cut, making it a bigger hit. They closed their set with a rendition of “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Ten minutes later, it was time for Luke Bryan. He took the stage to Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator.” He jumped into the last single on his sophomore album, “Someone Else Calling You Baby.”

Bryan doesn’t just stand in the center of the stage like a lot of performers — he makes the stage his own. He dances and moves around the stage with more energy of any artist that I’ve ever seen, beating out the likes of Garth Brooks and the Backstreet Boys.

He wasted no time working up a sweat, jumping into his songs such as “Drinkin’ Beer and Chasin’ Bullets,” “Faded Away” and “Drunk on You.”

Bryan then started telling a story about how he went to a country show in Albany and saw a guy from Valdosta perform, singing songs about things he grew up on — breaking for brunettes, riding dirt roads. That artist was Akins, who Bryan brought back out to sing Akins’ biggest hit as an artist, “That Ain’t My Truck,” which is still one of the biggest hits in country music.

The crowd went crazy when Bryan sat down at a piano where he began singing his first number one hit, “Do I,” a song he co-wrote with two members of Lady Antebellum. He left the piano and walked down the catwalk and began singing a mixture of cover songs, including “The Joker” with a mix of Alabama’s “Song of the South.”

He then jumped into rapping Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” to Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” to TuPac’s “California,” but instead of saying California, he replaced it with “Valdosta knows how to party.”

During that point, he asked the audience for another rap song to sing and this reporter shouted out “Baby Got Back.” Bryan pointed me out and the audience went crazy, rapping the song to Bryan who joined in.

Finally, Bryan got back to what he’s best known for — country music. He went into his first single, “All My Friends Say” and his biggest hit, “Rain is a Good Thing.” Bryan closed out the show performing a mixture of Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time” and Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” before shaking his way into his recent number one, “Country Girl (Shake It For Me),” which drove the crowd crazy.

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