A 16-year-old Taylor Swift once played a Pensacola sausage festival
There are nine dates remaining, but already Taylor Swift’s current tour — “The Eras Tour” — has grossed in excess of $2.2 billion dollars and advance ticket sales for the movie of the concert, opening Friday across the U.S., has already exceeded $100 million.
But in Pensacola, Fla., they are remembering a time when the global superstar was in the infancy of her career — a 16-year-old featured among the entertainment at the Beulah Sausage Festival, according to the Pensacola News Journal.
Today, people shell out upwards of $500 (or more for resale) for tickets to see Swift perform live. But in March 2007, those attending the sausage festival could have seen the young Swift at no cost.
The newspaper ran an image of a print advertisement which ran advertising the festival, which included the “rising country music sensation,” as Swift was called in the ad. The ad included a brief biography of Swift’s career in which she listed some of her accomplishments, including performing the national anthem at a Philadelphia 76ers game when she was 11 and learning to play and write her own music by the time she was 12.
She cited her maternal grandmother, a professional opera singer, as an inspiration and the bio notes she was a straight-A student while simultaneously beginning her career as a recording artist.
“I was playing four hours a day until my finger were bleeding and my mom called me to dinner,” she was quoted in the ad.
Her set list for the Beulah Sausage Festival featured songs from her eponymous debut album, released in 2006, including “Tim McGraw,” Teardrops On My Guitar,” “Our Song,” and “Picture To Burn.”
Amazingly, Swift performed as an opening act for established country stars including Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Brad Paisley and McGraw and Faith Hill’s joint tour during 2006 and 2007.
But on that night in March 2007, she performed at the Beulah Sausage Festival.
Swift, however, was not the only music superstar to perform at the festival. Blake Shelton, Lonestar, Diamond Rio and Lynyrd Skynyrd all performed there, according to the PNJ.
Sadly, the festival, which began in 1986, was discontinued in 2015 due to a lack of sponsorships.