Battle of the Blues Divas 2010

This archive entry corresponds to the 2010-dated installment of the Southern California Blues Society's "Battle of the Blues Divas" series, as named by the original page's URL on scbsevents.org. The Southern California Blues Journal is an independent fan-run guide rebuilding and contextualizing this domain's record of local blues community events.

Entering 2010, the national blues scene was still absorbing the loss of Koko Taylor, the Chicago blues singer known for decades as the "Queen of the Blues," who died in June 2009. Just months before her death, Shemekia Copeland had been publicly given Koko Taylor's crown as the "New Queen of the Blues" at the 2009 Chicago Blues Festival, a changing-of-the-guard moment that was widely covered in blues media at the time. Local "divas" showcases staged by regional blues societies around the country, including Southern California's version, existed against that backdrop of renewed attention to women's place at the center of the genre, not at its margins.

The instinct to spotlight women specifically, rather than folding them into a general bill, has a real institutional parallel at the national level. The Blues Foundation's own Blues Music Awards have long maintained separate "Traditional Blues Female Artist" and "Contemporary Blues Female Artist" categories alongside the men's equivalents, an acknowledgment that mixed-gender ballots in a genre historically dominated by male guitarists tended to under-recognize women vocalists and players. A local "divas" showcase like SCBS's is best understood as a grassroots version of that same corrective impulse, years before some of today's larger festivals began dedicating stages or showcases specifically to women in blues.

If you are trying to piece together the fuller history of this series, two related pages may help. Our Battle of the Blues Divas: Event History page covers the series format and SCBS's broader programming, while More Battle of the Blues Divas: Archive Collection gathers what additional fragments and images we have located elsewhere on the old site structure. Our general photo archive is also worth checking as we continue adding attributed images.