Blues Bash VII at The Clayton Center features two International Blues Challenge winners. The Bart Walker Band and Matt Anderson will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 23, at The Clayton Center, 112 E. Second St., Clayton. Walker was awarded the Gibson Guitar Best Blues Guitarist in the 2012 International Blues Challenge. The band placed second in the competition out of 228 competing bands.

With the release of “Who I Am” and Walker’s continuing on-stage exposure as country star Bo Bice’s six-string right-hand man, Walker is ready to claim his place in the national and international blues scene.

Andersen exhilarates audiences with his soulful and powerful voice and hard-driving slide guitar. In 2011, Andersen won the Maple Blues Award for Entertainer of the Year and Acoustic Act of the Year and the East Coast Music Association Blues Recording of the Year award.

In 2010 Anderson became the first Canadian to win Memphis’s famed International Blues Challenge, which led to festival dates in France, Italy, and the U.S., where he toured with Old Crow Medicine Show. In the United Kingdom, The Times dubbed him “Canada’s greatest guitarist.”

Buy the $25 tickets online at theclaytoncenter.com, by phone at 919-553-1737, or at The Clayton Center box office, 10 a.m.- noon and 1-5 p.m. Monday through Friday.