Blues Societies in California and Beyond
People searching for "contact SCBS" are usually trying to reach a real, operating blues organization — not this journal. This page is a directory-style guide to finding and contacting blues societies in California and across the United States generally. We're not going to reproduce an old Southern California Blues Society address, phone number, or email here as though it's a current, working line, because we can't confirm SCBS is still operating that contact channel, or operating at all in the form it once did. Treating a stale contact as live would do readers a disservice, so instead this page points to sources that are actively maintained by the organizations themselves.
Start with the Blues Foundation's affiliate map
The single most reliable starting point is The Blues Foundation's own affiliate directory at blues.org. The Blues Foundation, a Memphis nonprofit founded in 1980, maintains a continuously updated map and list of its affiliated blues societies — a count that reportedly stood at roughly 108 organizations as of October 2025. Because affiliate societies come and go, change leadership, and sometimes change contact emails, the foundation's own directory is going to be more current than any list we could maintain by hand, including this one.
Active Southern California-area societies
A few regional organizations currently maintain their own sites and are worth contacting directly if you're a musician, venue, or fan looking to get involved locally. Blues Lovers United of San Diego (BLUSD) is a 501(c)(3) Blues Foundation affiliate serving the San Diego area, with contact details on its own site. The Long Beach Blues Society, incorporated in 2015, runs community blues programs — Blues for Vets, Blues for Seniors, Blues in the Schools — and can be reached through its own website. Further up the coast, the Santa Barbara Blues Society, one of the older societies on the West Coast, dating to 1977, maintains an active events and links page of its own.
If you're specifically trying to reach the historical Southern California Blues Society — the nonprofit that ran the Topanga Blues Festival and the Long Beach-based Battle of the Blues Bands for decades — we'd encourage checking the Blues Foundation's current affiliate list first, since that will reflect whether the organization, or a successor, is still formally affiliated, rather than relying on an old address or email that may no longer be monitored. We deliberately haven't republished SCBS's older contact details here for that reason.
For a broader directory of blues magazines, radio shows, and festival resources beyond just societies, see our blues links page, which also links to an extended links page. And if your question is about this journal itself rather than about reaching a blues society, our contact page explains how to get in touch with the editorial team.