Juke Joint, March 2010: Part 1
Facts
- This page's title indicates it was "Part 1" of a two-part photo-gallery-style writeup for a March 2010 LA Juke Joint evening run by SCBS.
- The pairing with a "Part 2" page is consistent with common early-2010s community-website practice of splitting large photo galleries across multiple pages.
This is the archive entry for "Part 1" of a March 2010 LA Juke Joint evening originally documented on the Southern California Blues Society's website. As with the rest of this rebuilt domain, the Southern California Blues Journal presents this as a historical placeholder: an honest record that an event by this name and at this address once existed.
The split into "Part 1" and "Part 2" pages, which also appears on this site's other juke joint entry from the same month, strongly suggests the original page was primarily a photo gallery, broken across two pages because a single page could not comfortably hold every image from the evening. That is a common pattern on early-2010s nonprofit and community-organization websites, which were frequently built on simple content-management systems with limits on how many embedded photos a single page could carry gracefully.
The juke joint tradition is not purely historical, either. Clarksdale, Mississippi has run an annual Juke Joint Festival since 2004, drawing blues fans from around the world to the same Delta streets and surviving juke joints that shaped the music a century earlier, proof that the format SCBS was evoking with its "LA Juke Joint" branding still has active, celebrated counterparts in the genre's home region. A Southern California blues society borrowing the name in the 2000s was tapping into a tradition that, far from fading, was being actively revived and promoted by tourism boards and musicians alike during the very years this event took place.
What we can speak to with confidence is the broader tradition this event was almost certainly drawing on. As covered in more depth on our LA Juke Joint 2009 page, "juke joint" nights held by blues societies outside the South are generally community and fundraising events that borrow the name and festive spirit of the historic Southern juke joint tradition without claiming to literally be one. A March 2010 installment of SCBS's recurring LA Juke Joint series fits that pattern. For the second half of this same evening's documentation, continue to Juke Joint, March 2010: Part 2, and browse our photo archive for anything we have been able to source and credit properly.
