photo courtesy of The Dallas Morning News

On Saturday night in Texas, Blake Shelton was scheduled to perform at the annual Cattle Baron's Ball, which was raising money for the American Cancer Society. It ended up being a rain-soaked mess and everyone expected Blake to cancel due to the weather and, as The Dallas Morning News reports, it would have been well within his right to take his paycheck and run without having performed a note.

But Blake didn't do that and in the end helped to save the day. 

But he walked out on the main stage (under a freshly constructed tent) with a beer in one hand and a guitar in the other.

“I’m not a guitar player at all,” he said apologetically. “I don’t know how to play a lot of my songs. So, y’all are gonna drink and act like you like it and I’m gonna play guitar and act like I’m good at it.”

And then a little magic dust fell.

It turns out that Blake Shelton is better than competent with country guitar’s three-chord canon. And his powerful, soaring voice doesn’t require double-tracking, Auto-Tune or backup singers.

By the time he got to his first No. 1 hit, “Austin,” he had taken ahold of everybody. Melancholy tunes like “Home,” were mixed with rowdy numbers like “Some Beach” and “Kiss My Country ***” and laced with the occasional admission, “I’ve been drinking tonight.”

The newspaper says that what started out as a lot of wet, grumpy fans expecting the worse ended up being a record-breaking Cattle Baron's event weekend with $841,000 being raised at their auction and $1.2 million raised overall as of Sunday with the numbers still climbing. 

story courtesy of Nashvillegab.com