Regional IBC, November 2010
Facts
- Zac Harmon and the Mid-South Blues Revue, sponsored by the Southern California Blues Society, won "Best Unsigned Band" at the 2004 International Blues Challenge in Memphis (Wikipedia: Zac Harmon; International Blues Challenge).
- The IBC's judging rubric (Blues Content, Originality, Vocals, Instrumental Talent, Stage Presence, each scored 1-10 by a three-judge panel) was the standard format used by affiliate societies' regional qualifiers (Blues Foundation official rules).
- Local blues-society IBC qualifiers were sponsor-run events; an act had to be sent by an affiliate society and could not enter the Memphis finals independently (Blues Foundation official rules).
This page stands in for the opening installment of a photo gallery the original scbsevents.org site appears to have run after a Regional IBC qualifying round in November 2010. As with the 2009 round covered elsewhere on this journal, we have not found an independent archive of the original gallery's text or images, and we are not going to guess at details the historical record does not support. Instead, this page exists to keep the archive's structure intact and to explain, honestly, what this kind of local blues-society event represented.
By 2010, the Southern California Blues Society had already sent at least one act on to real success at the national level: Zac Harmon and the Mid-South Blues Revue, sponsored by SCBS, had won the IBC's "Best Unsigned Band" award back in 2004, a win Harmon later said was worth well over a hundred thousand dollars in publicity and bookings. That track record is the kind of thing a regional blues society would want to build on year after year, and an annual November qualifying round, feeding into the following January's IBC finals in Memphis, was the mechanism for doing it.
These regional rounds were typically modest affairs by design: a handful of local bar bands and semi-professional acts playing short sets, in front of a panel of three judges scoring on the IBC's five standard categories, for an audience that was as likely to be other local musicians and blues-society members as paying ticket holders. They were community events first and competitions second, which is part of why so little independent documentation of any single night tends to survive once the sponsoring organization's own website goes offline, as scbsevents.org eventually did.
If this gallery once showed a specific stage, a specific set of bands, or a specific audience on a specific November night in 2010, we cannot responsibly reconstruct that here. For the surviving photo index from this archive, see photos; for the prior year's qualifying round, see Regional IBC, November 2009: Part 2; and for the gallery's continuation, see Regional IBC, November 2010: Part 2.
