Blues Musicians Will Add a Rosy Glow to New Year’s Weekend : Legendary B.B. King and the Gregg Allman Band bring their timeless favorites to the Ventura Theatre.

Blues fans of both the casual and die-hard variety can thank their lucky stars this weekend. The New Year’s weekend finds two blues veterans passing through: B.B. King and, from a younger generation, Gregg Allman.

When B.B. King comes to town, as he will at the Ventura Theatre on Friday night, he’s toting along a living blues legacy that extends back half a century. He brings a gruff but warm how-do-you-do vocal style, a sharp way with a guitar and an urbane backup band complete with someone to announce the King’s arrivals and departures from the stage: “Mr. B . . . B . . . King!”

But King is also bringing something else that few musicians can lay claim to: an instrument we know and love on a first-name basis. King’s “Lucille,” a Gibson 335, has seen him through thick and thin, but mostly thick.

By this point, the 70-year-old King is an American icon, like Johnny Cash or Tony Bennett, who cuts through generational and cultural barriers and helps to define American music.

A few years back, King showed up as a special guest on U2’s film “Rattle and Hum,” doing the tune “When Love Comes to Town,” which has since become a staple for King’s repertoire, alongside such timeless blues anthems as “The Thrill Is Gone.”

The thrill isn’t gone.

What better way to wrap up another year, and kick off New Year’s weekend than with a B.B. King show? It’s a family affair. Parents, bring your kids. Kids, bring your parents. See an American legend, live and in person, on stage.

King’s latest release is the fine “Blues Summit,” a cavalcade of blues greats in duets with the King. Recorded in Memphis and Berkeley in 1993, the album is one of the best things King has done in recent years, and a juicy document of blues culture, gathered around the studio campfire.

It opens up, fittingly, with “Playin’ With My Friends,” pairing B.B. with the suave soul-blues musician Robert Cray. King plays witty gender pingpong with Koko Taylor and Etta James.

On “They Call It Stormy Monday,” King gets way down with the stinging telecaster master Albert Collins, who died last year in the midst of a late-career revival. Collins’ fire-and-ice approach was like no other, and you hear the stamp from the first lashing riffs.

The album also documents the first meeting of King with a swampier player, John Lee Hooker, the acknowledged boogie guru. On “You Shook Me,” Hooker’s mumble-funky voice and squirrelly guitar bring out a growling side of King.

King also plays with Joe Louis Walker, Buddy Guy, Lowell Fulson, and, with King’s own “orchestra,” he does a medley ending with “Nobody Loves Me but My Mother.”

Fact is, everybody loves B.B. and Lucille, the royal couple of the blues.

BLUES, WHITE DIVISION

If blues or that proverbial hyphenate blues-rock is your cup of suds, you might want to head down to the Ventura Theatre on New Year’s Eve, when the Gregg Allman Band crosses the bridge between the old and the new. Bring your own hats and horns.

Allman’s band, featuring guitarist Danny Chauncey of the group .38-Special, deals in blues, country and Southern rock, the same soup stock as the Allman Brothers, but with more of a focus on Allman’s singer-songwriter-organist talents.

There’s some poetic justice in Allman showing up in town the same weekend as B.B. King, one of the traveling blues stars Allman listened to as a teenager growing up in Florida in the ‘60s, before he started the band Hourglass with his brother Duane.

Allman, and the original band he still plays with, is living proof of commercial reincarnation. He’s a ‘70s hero who slipped under the surface of music during the ‘80s, and enjoyed newfound appreciation in these all-over-the-map ‘90s.

Some of us found ourselves obsessed and culturally rewired by the Allman Brothers’ “Live at Fillmore East” double album. It was the band’s finest hour on record, with the heated exchanges between Duane Allman’s tasty, go-for-broke slide-guitar work and Dickie Betts’ feisty guitar playing, alongside Gregg’s throaty voice and swirling organ playing.

Like the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers specialized--and still do--in extended grooves and guitar solos that go hither and yon, all with a strange, trippy organic flow.

The band’s history got twisted quickly, starting with Duane’s death in a motorcycle accident in 1971. The band carried on, racking up occasional hits, such as “Ramblin’ Man,” but Allman also launched his own parallel career as a solo artist, and his rocky road was compounded over the years with bouts of substance abuse.

What goes around is coming around, as blues and Southern-brand rock make their return to the alternative-rocking scene. Go figure. And who would have thunk that Gregg Allman would still sound so good and fresh after all these years?

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DETAILS

* B.B. KING, shows at 8 and 10:30 p.m. Friday at the Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut St., Ventura. Tickets are $21.50 for the early show and $19.50 for the late show; 648-1888.

* GREGG ALLMAN BAND, shows at 7 and 10:30 p.m. Sunday at the Ventura Theatre. Tickets are $21.50 for the early show and $36.50 for the late show; 648-1888.