Battle of the Blues Divas: Event History

This page is an archive entry maintained by the Southern California Blues Journal, an independent fan guide to the Southern California blues scene. We are not affiliated with, and do not claim to be, the original Southern California Blues Society (SCBS), the Los Angeles-based nonprofit that ran community blues events in this region for decades before its website, and apparently the organization itself, went offline. What follows is an attempt to responsibly preserve the record that an event called "Battle of the Blues Divas" existed and recurred as part of SCBS's community programming, while being upfront about what we could and could not independently confirm.

SCBS described itself, through archived listings and its own event pages, as a volunteer-run organization founded in 1982 that became an affiliate of The Blues Foundation (the Memphis-based nonprofit behind the International Blues Challenge) around 1999. Alongside fundraising concerts, the group appears to have run a rotating slate of themed community nights, including an LA Juke Joint evening, a "Six String Showdown" guitar competition, a "Battle of the 20 Blues Bands" regional qualifier, and this Battle of the Blues Divas series. The "battle" format, pitting performers against one another for an audience and/or a panel of judges, is a common structure used by regional blues societies across the country both to generate excitement and to raise modest funds for the society's operations and for sending a local act to compete at the IBC in Memphis.

A "diva" showcase built specifically around women vocalists fits into a much longer and well-documented thread in blues history. Women were foundational to the genre from its earliest commercially recorded era: Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Memphis Minnie were among the music's first stars, and that lineage continued through Big Mama Thornton, Koko Taylor (who was widely known as the "Queen of the Blues" until her death in 2009), Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, and Shemekia Copeland, who was formally given Koko Taylor's crown as the "New Queen of the Blues" at the 2009 Chicago Blues Festival. Despite that pedigree, women performers have historically had to fight harder than their male counterparts for marquee billing on blues stages, which is part of why local societies around the country have organized events specifically spotlighting female vocalists. We have no evidence that any of the nationally known names above performed at a Southern California Blues Society event, and we want to be explicit that mentioning them here is cultural context, not a claim about this event's lineup.

What we can verify directly about this specific page is limited: a snapshot of this URL was captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, confirming that scbsevents.org published a page at this address before the site lapsed. We were not able to retrieve readable archived text from that snapshot to confirm dates, venues, performer names, or outcomes for any individual Battle of the Blues Divas evening. For the installment we do have a dated URL for, see our Battle of the Blues Divas 2010 entry, and browse our photo archive for whatever surviving images we have been able to gather and attribute responsibly.