The soul/funk/blues band recently won the Iowa Blues Challenge, and will go on to compete in Memphis in February for the International Blues Challenge, so they are definitely getting noticed by many and proving their talents. They are new to the local band scene within the past year, but you could hardly tell by the way they play.

Kate Benson: I think currently the best band in the Quad Cities is The Candymakers. We'll add them back in online if you re-Tweet! We had a different purpose this time through, and we hope that these nominations help you learn new things about our community, and perhaps to check out something new.Īnd a final note to two people who nominated via Twitter a local tattoo artist for best local visual artist: By the time we realized that Twitter searches only go back a few weeks, your Tweets were lost to us. Keep in mind that there are no 'winners' in a traditional Best of the Quad Cities sense. Essays have been lightly edited for spelling, grammar, and River Cities' Reader style. In the spirit of the tool, Tweets are presented unedited. In these pages are this fall's submissions, with only the off-topic and overly repetitive removed. (Lance Dillie, on the other hand, was a model of self-promotion, attracting 15 nominations from friends, family, customers, and - it must be said - himself.) We encouraged those with a vested interest in a category to actively push themselves - either by submitting nominations or asking their fans to do so - and we were surprised how few did. We were pleased to get more than 100 submissions, but it was frankly like pulling teeth to get people to participate. People didn't seem quite sure what to make of this new Best of the Quad Cities, or perhaps they missed the comfort of completing a fill-in-the-blanks survey. The ultimate goal was to get past the obvious and automatic responses that seemed to often rise to the top in past surveys - to spotlight hidden gems in the Quad Cities. The aim was to give voice to individuals over the masses, and to allow people to argue for their favorites instead of merely noting them. We reduced the categories to 20 and asked people to submit Tweets, videos, and short essays in support of their nominations. We gave them categories and lines on which to write, and we tallied the results, and the winners were the top vote-getters in each category.

For many years, we asked our readers to fill out surveys to determine the best of the Quad Cities.

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