Fifty years on, the Bellamy Brothers let it flow at the Long Center

The Florida duo's 50 Years of Hits tour reaches downtown Lafayette's 1921 theater on Thursday, Nov. 12.

There is a good chance a car radio somewhere in Tippecanoe County played "Let Your Love Flow" this week, and a good chance the driver sang along without thinking. Next Thursday, the brothers who made that record fifty years ago play downtown Lafayette.

The Bellamy Brothers play the Long Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 7:30 p.m. The theater seats 1,155. Tickets are through the Long Center.

Lafayette lands in the middle of a busy November. The duo plays Denver on Nov. 7 and Akron–Canton on Nov. 11, the night before here, then Branson on Nov. 14, Austin on Nov. 19 and two nights in Houston on Nov. 27 and 28. All year they have toured as the 50 Years of Hits tour, a run that also included their first-ever headlining show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, as Music Life Magazine and Grateful Web reported when it was announced.

The anniversary is straight arithmetic. "Let Your Love Flow" came out as a single on Jan. 3, 1976, and reached No. 1 by May of that year, according to ABC's coverage of the Ryman date. Larry Williams wrote it, and it reached David and Howard Bellamy through Neil Diamond's circle: Diamond's drummer, Dennis St. John, suggested the brothers record it, as American Songwriter tells it. The song keeps finding new listeners. In 2025 Budweiser put it in a Super Bowl commercial with its Clydesdales, and the brothers took its title for their 2019 book, *Let Your Love Flow – the Life and Times of The Bellamy Brothers* (Wikipedia). Their own site has the rest of the story, which is long.

Fifty years is a long time to keep singing the same song, and nobody in the room will mind.

A tour called 50 Years of Hits tells you what the night is for: a catalog built over five decades, sung by the same two voices that cut it. The Bellamys are touring artists in the old sense. They spent this year moving between theaters, fairs and casinos across the map, and a Thursday in Indiana sits between Ohio and Missouri dates without fuss.

The Long Center suits songs with that much mileage. The building dates to 1921 and opened as the Mars Theatre. The city later renamed it for the Long family in recognition of their generosity (Visit Lafayette–West Lafayette). The City of Lafayette owns it and the nonprofit Long Center Inc. runs it. The Lafayette Symphony Orchestra and Purdue Bands both perform there, and it houses the Long Center Theatre Organ Society's three-manual, 21-rank Mighty Wurlitzer, an organ with a story of its own that the Central Indiana chapter of ATOS has written up. Check the Long Center's calendar for what else is coming through this fall.

What to know before you go: it is a 7:30 start on a school night in a seated theater, so the evening is easy on the next morning. Buy through the Long Center's own box office link above rather than a reseller, and bring whoever taught you that song in the first place.

Somebody in that crowd will have been there in 1976. Somebody else will know it from a beer commercial. By the chorus, it won't matter which.

Sources: Long Center for the Performing Arts (tickets) (longpac.org); JamBase: The Bellamy Brothers at Long Center for the Performing Arts (jambase.com); Music Life Magazine: The Bellamy Brothers announce first-ever Ryman Auditorium headlining show (musiclifemagazine.net); Grateful Web: Bellamy Brothers to headline Ryman Auditorium for first time ever (gratefulweb.com); Lakes Media Network (ABC): The Bellamy Brothers will 'Let [Their] Love Flow' at the Ryman (lakesmedianetwork.com); American Songwriter: The Bellamy Brothers have Neil Diamond to thank for their first No. 1 hit (americansongwriter.com); Wikipedia: The Bellamy Brothers (en.wikipedia.org); Bellamy Brothers: About (bellamybrothers.com); Visit Lafayette–West Lafayette: Long Center for the Performing Arts (homeofpurdue.com); Long Center: Mars Theatre (longpac.org); CICATOS: The Long Center for the Performing Arts (Mars Theatre) (cicatos.org); Long Center events (longpac.org)