Battle of the Blues Bands in Southern California

For years, Southern California's route to blues music's biggest talent competition ran through a bar on the Long Beach waterfront. The Southern California Blues Society (SCBS) organized an annual "Battle of the 20 Blues Bands" contest, pitting regional acts against each other for the right to represent the area at the International Blues Challenge (IBC) in Memphis, Tennessee. This page is an independent guide to that competition circuit and how it connects to the IBC; it is not published by SCBS.

Event listings place the contest at Malainey's Grill & One Hell of an Irish Bar, at 168 North Marina Drive on Alamitos Bay in Long Beach, with advance tickets priced around $25 — proceeds explicitly earmarked to help cover the winning act's travel costs to Memphis. Promotional materials billed it as "the road to the IBC's," and SCBS had been a Blues Foundation affiliate organization since 1999, which is what made it eligible to send a representative to the Memphis event in the first place. Under IBC rules, only Blues Foundation affiliates can sponsor an act into the competition, and each affiliate is expected to run its own regional preliminary to select that representative.

A Southern California IBC champion

The clearest success story to come out of the Southern California qualifier is guitarist and singer Zac Harmon. Representing SCBS, Harmon and his band, the Mid-South Blues Revue, won the "Best Unsigned Band" honor at the 2004 International Blues Challenge in Memphis — one of the more notable wins any Southern California-affiliated act has had at the national event. It's a useful benchmark for how the local-to-Memphis pipeline is meant to work: a regional nonprofit runs a local battle, the winner travels to Beale Street, and occasionally that winner takes home a national title.

The IBC itself has grown considerably since it started. The Blues Foundation, a Memphis nonprofit founded in 1980, ran an earlier version of the event as the Blues Amateur Talent Contest before relaunching it under the International Blues Challenge name in January 2000, with about 50 bands. More than 200 acts now compete annually, split since 2002 into Band and Solo/Duo categories, alongside add-on awards for guitar playing and self-produced recordings. For a broader walkthrough of how the competition works and how regional affiliates participate, see our International Blues Challenge guide.

SCBS ran companion showcases alongside the main band battle, including a vocalist contest it called the "Battle of the Blues Divas"; we cover one notable edition in our Battle of the Blues Divas write-up. We've also put together an archive recap of one specific regional qualifier night, a November 2010 qualifier, though independent documentation of that exact date is thin and some details there should be treated as provisional rather than confirmed. Photos from several of these competition nights, where we could source properly licensed images, are collected on our photo archive page.