Topanga Blues Festival in the Press

The Topanga Blues Festival is one of the longest-running blues events in Southern California, held every spring on the outdoor stage at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon. Its roots go back to 1982, when a small group of fans founded the Southern California Blues Society (SCBS) with the goal of preserving and promoting blues music in the region. This journal is an independent fan guide to that history and to the Southern California blues scene more broadly — it is not affiliated with, and does not speak for, the Southern California Blues Society or any organization that has run the festival. We don't sell tickets, memberships, or donations here; we simply track and summarize what has been publicly reported about the festival over more than four decades.

A Nonprofit With a Long Résumé

The Southern California Blues Society was an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) public-benefit organization. Beyond the Topanga festival, SCBS became an affiliate of The Blues Foundation (the Memphis-based organization behind the International Blues Challenge) in 1999, and it ran a Southern California regional qualifier for the Challenge for years afterward. One of its regional representatives, guitarist and songwriter Zac Harmon, went on to win the International Blues Challenge outright in Memphis in 2004 — a genuine point of pride for the local scene and one of the more notable "exports" of the Topanga stage. In past years, festival proceeds were also directed toward the Willie Dixon Scholarship Fund and a "Blues in the Schools" education program, alongside free community blues concerts.

Decades of Local Coverage

Press coverage of the festival has mostly come from regional and music-trade outlets rather than national media. Over the years, the event and the broader SCBS story have drawn attention from the Topanga Messenger, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Sentinel, Billboard, Orange Coast Magazine, the Glendale News-Press, and the Los Angeles Times, among other local papers and listings — the kind of steady, unglamorous coverage you'd expect for a community-rooted event that has quietly outlasted most of its contemporaries. We have not been able to independently pull the full text of every one of those articles, so we're not going to pretend to quote lines from pieces we haven't read; what's verifiable is the festival's own performer history, which is extensive. Over four decades, acts who have played Topanga include Etta James, Willie Dixon, Otis Rush, Big Joe Turner, Lowell Fulson, Junior Wells, Paul Butterfield, William Clarke, Pee Wee Crayton, Phillip Walker, Eddy Clearwater, and Linda Hopkins — a lineup history that reads like a survey of postwar American blues.

Recent Editions

Like most live events, the festival was knocked off its normal schedule by the pandemic: the 2020 edition was cancelled and effectively deferred to 2021. It has continued since. The 37th annual festival, held May 7, 2022, billed Tail Dragger as headliner with an opening set from Johnny Burgin, John Primer on the bill as well, Mara Kaye and Tim McNalley as an acoustic opening duo, and Kyle Rowland as a special guest. The May 17, 2025 edition was headlined by Rod Piazza and Nora Jean Bruso, and the event listed for May 17, 2026 — billed by at least one performer's own site as "the 43rd annual" — features Bobby Rush, Kirk Fletcher, and Earl Thomas. Worth flagging honestly: the anniversary numbers don't line up cleanly with a straight 1982 start (a "28th annual" festival in 2011 and a "37th annual" in 2022 both imply a first edition closer to 1984–1986), so if you're trying to pin down an exact year-by-year count, treat the "Nth annual" labels as approximate rather than authoritative.

For a closer look at specific past editions, see our archive of past events, and for more on how this independent project relates to the festival's history, visit About Us.