New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 1
Facts
- New Year's Eve has long been treated by club musicians and venues across genres, including blues, as one of the year's highest-demand live-music nights, a widely documented pattern in the live music industry generally.
- Local and regional blues societies affiliated with the Blues Foundation, such as SCBS, commonly functioned as nonprofit community organizations that ran member-facing social events in addition to competitions like the IBC qualifiers.
- scbsevents.org was the documented website of the real Southern California Blues Society, a Los Angeles-area blues nonprofit, per business-directory and press listings found in research for this archive.
This page documents the first part of a photo gallery for a New Year's Eve blues event at the close of 2009, originally published on the Southern California Blues Society's scbsevents.org site. Here is honest context about what an event like this generally was, and why a blues society would run one.
New Year's Eve has long been one of the biggest nights of the year for club-circuit musicians of every genre, blues included, simply because it is a guaranteed audience night: people who want to go out, hear live music, and ring in the new year somewhere with energy and a dance floor. Blues clubs and blues societies across the country have a long-running informal tradition of hosting their own New Year's Eve shows, often built around regular local bands rather than touring headliners, as a members' and community event rather than a tourist draw. A small nonprofit blues society holding its own New Year's Eve party for its members and the wider local scene, the kind of event this gallery seems to document, fits squarely within that broader pattern.
For a community organization like SCBS, an event like this would likely have doubled as both a celebration and a low-key fundraiser or membership event, the kind of gathering that generates plenty of snapshots, bands on stage, people dancing, the room decorated for the holiday.
This pattern is far from unique to Southern California. Chicago's Kingston Mines and Buddy Guy's Legends, two of the city's most storied blues clubs, have for decades built their own New Year's Eve programming around the same logic: a night when even casual fans who rarely go hear live blues the rest of the year show up specifically because it is New Year's Eve, not because of any particular headliner. A small nonprofit blues society holding its own version of that night, scaled to its own membership and local following, was participating in a tradition that runs through blues clubs of every size, from the biggest rooms in Chicago down to community halls and VFW posts across the country.
This archive's surviving photo index is at photos, this same New Year's gallery continues at New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 2, and for the other major Southern California blues event documented from that same year, see Long Beach Blues Festival 2009.
