Regional IBC, November 2008
Facts
- The International Blues Challenge (IBC) is a real, ongoing competition produced annually by The Blues Foundation in Memphis, open only to acts sponsored by a Blues Foundation affiliated blues society.
- SCBS was, by its own account, a Blues Foundation affiliate from around 1999, which would have made it eligible to sponsor a Southern California act at the IBC via a local qualifying round such as this one.
This page archives the record of a November 2008 "Regional IBC" event run by the former Southern California Blues Society, understood here as SCBS's local qualifying competition that sent a Southern California act forward to compete at the International Blues Challenge (IBC) in Memphis. The Southern California Blues Journal is an independent, fan-produced guide to the region's blues scene, rebuilding the historical record of SCBS's community events honestly.
The International Blues Challenge itself is real, well-documented, and still running today. It is produced by The Blues Foundation, a Memphis-based nonprofit, and traces back to a National Blues Talent Contest the Foundation began staging in 1984, which was renamed the International Blues Challenge in 1995 and moved to its current January/February Memphis schedule starting in 2000. Acts cannot enter the IBC directly; they must be sponsored by a Blues Foundation affiliated blues society, which is exactly the role SCBS, as a Blues Foundation affiliate from around 1999 onward, would have played for Southern California acts. Affiliates run their own local preliminary "battle" competitions, often simply called a regional or local IBC qualifier, to decide which band or solo/duo act they will send to Memphis that year, with the categories for Band and Solo/Duo acts having been formalized by the Blues Foundation in 2002.
Based on that structure, SCBS's "Regional IBC, November 2008" event was this kind of local qualifying round, a competition among several Southern California acts judged for the chance to represent the society at the following year's IBC in Memphis.
The scale of the IBC has grown substantially since SCBS's era of participation. What began in the 1980s as a small regional talent contest now draws well over 200 acts from blues societies across the United States and, in many years, from affiliate organizations overseas, making it the largest gathering of its kind in the genre. A society the size of SCBS sending even a single act through a regional qualifier like this one was part of a pipeline that, by the 2000s, had already made Memphis's Beale Street the de facto proving ground for unsigned blues talent nationally.
For the following year's qualifier in this same series, see our Regional IBC, November 2009: Part 1 page, and for another SCBS fundraising event from around the same era, see New Year's Eve, December 2009: Part 3. Our photo archive collects what images we can source and credit.
