About Southern California Blues Journal

Southern California Blues Journal is an independent fan journal and research project covering the blues music scene in and around Los Angeles, Long Beach, and the wider Southern California region — festivals, band competitions, radio programs, and the nonprofits that have kept the music going. We are not the Southern California Blues Society (SCBS), we are not affiliated with or endorsed by SCBS, and we do not operate on its behalf in any capacity. We don't sell tickets, collect donations, or run memberships. Where we discuss SCBS, we're writing about it the way we'd write about any historical organization: as a documented part of the region's blues history, not as our own identity.

SCBS itself was a real, Los Angeles-area 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in 1982. For roughly four decades it organized the Topanga Blues Festival at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum and ran band and vocalist competitions — including an annual "Battle of the 20 Blues Bands" out of Long Beach — that fed into the Blues Foundation's International Blues Challenge in Memphis. SCBS became a Blues Foundation affiliate in 1999, and its 2004 regional representative, Zac Harmon, went on to win a national title. By the 2020s, public signs of regular SCBS activity had become harder to find, and several directory listings and event pages tied to the organization appeared stale. We treat the organization's current operating status as uncertain rather than asserting it is either active or closed, and we note explicitly on relevant pages where our information may be out of date.

How we research and verify

Every factual claim on this site — names, dates, venues, who organized what — is checked against primary sources where they exist: official festival listings, the Blues Foundation's own materials, newspaper and magazine coverage, and the organizations' current websites. We do not invent quotes, statistics, or specific claims we can't confirm, and when a detail can't be verified with confidence, we say so plainly on the relevant page rather than guessing. Older event pages, in particular, carry a caveat that some specifics — an exact date, an attendance figure, a lineup detail — could not be independently confirmed beyond the listing we found.

We also try to keep the site current. Blues societies, in Southern California and elsewhere, are almost all small, all-volunteer operations, and their web presence can lag behind what's actually happening on the ground — a festival might change venues, a radio show might change hosts, a society's contact address might go stale for years before anyone notices. If you spot something here that's wrong, outdated, or missing, please get in touch; our contact page explains how to reach the editorial team with corrections or event submissions.

For a sense of what's covered, our press page collects historical press mentions tied to local blues events, and our past events archive documents festivals and competitions going back years. Start from the home page for an overview of the whole project.