More Battle of the Blues Divas: Archive Collection
Facts
- The page appears, by its title and placement, to have been a supplementary/continuation page for the Battle of the Blues Divas 2010 event.
- Babe's & Ricky's Inn, a real, independently documented South LA blues club, was active through the late 2000s and closed shortly after its owner's 2009 death, giving a sense of the venue landscape SCBS operated within.
This page serves as a supplementary archive collection for the Southern California Blues Society's "Battle of the Blues Divas" series, gathering what additional fragments, images, or references we have been able to locate beyond the dedicated 2010 event page. As with the rest of this site, the Southern California Blues Journal is an independent, fan-produced guide to the region's blues history and current scene; we are rebuilding this domain as a journal and resource, not reviving the original nonprofit or its programs, and we are not selling tickets, memberships, or donations tied to any SCBS legacy.
Community blues societies across the country have long used "more photos" or "additional coverage" follow-up pages to extend a single event writeup, since a volunteer-run organization's website typically could not host every image from a given night on one page. It is reasonable to assume this page played that role for SCBS originally, continuing documentation that began on the main 2010 Battle of the Blues Divas entry.
Southern California's blues infrastructure in this era included real, independently documented venues and figures worth knowing about as background. Babe's & Ricky's Inn, a storied South Los Angeles blues club founded by Laura Mae "Mama Laura" Gross and later relocated to Leimert Park, hosted touring and local blues artists for decades and remained a fixture of the city's blues circuit into the late 2000s before closing not long after Gross's death in 2009. Clubs like it formed the backbone of the scene that local organizations such as SCBS drew performers and audiences from, and they help explain why a community society in Los Angeles would have had a pool of working women vocalists to showcase in a "divas" format in the first place.
Leimert Park, where Babe's & Ricky's Inn relocated to in the late 1990s, has its own standing as a center of Black Los Angeles arts and music beyond blues specifically, home over the decades to jazz clubs, drum circles, and African marketplace culture that made the neighborhood a natural fit for a blues club looking for a historically Black, culturally active home base after leaving its original South Central location.
See our Battle of the Blues Divas 2010 page for the main dated entry in this series, our LA Juke Joint 2009 page for a related SCBS community event from the same general period, and our general photo archive for everything we have gathered so far.
