Regional IBC, November 2010: Part 2
Facts
- Los Angeles was a center of the postwar West Coast blues and jump blues sound in the 1940s and 1950s, a lineage frequently cited in blues histories of the region.
- The Blues Foundation's IBC system relies on a national network of affiliate societies, each running its own qualifying round before sending a winner to the Memphis finals (Blues Foundation official rules).
- The Southern California Blues Society was a verified Blues Foundation affiliate with a track record in the competition, including sponsoring 2004 IBC winner Zac Harmon (Wikipedia: Zac Harmon).
This page continues the gallery for the November 2010 Regional IBC round discussed on the previous page of this section. Here is more on the relationship between California's local blues club circuit and the Memphis finals these regional rounds fed into.
Southern California has a long, well-documented blues lineage of its own, running from the West Coast blues and jump blues sounds that took root in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s through decades of club and festival culture across the Los Angeles and Long Beach area. By the time an event like a 2010 regional IBC qualifier would have taken place, that lineage had produced generations of local players who treated the IBC not as an abstract national contest but as a natural extension of a scene they already lived in every week at neighborhood clubs and jams.
The Blues Foundation's IBC drew, and still draws, affiliate societies from across the country, including a number of California-based blues societies beyond SCBS itself, each sending its own local qualifying winner to Memphis. That structure meant a California band's path to Beale Street ran through exactly this kind of unglamorous regional heat: a weeknight or weekend show, a handful of competitors, three judges with scorecards, and a modest local crowd, long before anyone involved would be playing in Memphis in front of a national blues audience.
SCBS was not the only Southern California-based Blues Foundation affiliate running this kind of qualifier during this period. Further south, Blues Lovers United of San Diego (BLUSD) and, up the coast, the Santa Barbara Blues Society, were doing the same thing for their own regions, meaning a California band's actual odds of reaching Memphis depended partly on which society's regional round it happened to enter. That layered, society-by-society structure, repeated across dozens of cities nationally, is what let the Blues Foundation stage a genuinely national competition every January without ever requiring bands to qualify through a single centralized audition.
The surviving photo index for this archive lives at photos, and the first part of this same November 2010 gallery is covered at Regional IBC, November 2010.
