John Lee Hooker to be celebrated with Detroit blues pageant

Detroit’s dean of the blues is established to be honored with a particular summer season tribute, which include a posthumous essential to the city.

The late bluesman John Lee Hooker will be celebrated by community and traveling to performers at the most up-to-date edition of Detroit Tunes Weekend, scheduled July 2 outdoors New music Corridor.

The no cost festival will feature a daylong lineup of artists undertaking in celebration of the influential singer-guitarist, including Michigan mainstay Bettye LaVette, Detroit blues queen Thornetta Davis and Serbian-born star Ana Popovic. Detroit’s Jimmy D. Scott will near the night with an all-star jam that features Kern Brantley, Howard Glazer and Harmonica Shah. Tosha Owens and Eliza Neals also fill the invoice.

For fest organizer Vince Paul, president of Music Hall, the real coup is the reserving of Zakiya Hooker, the 74-year-old daughter of the late musician and a veteran blues artist in her possess ideal. She’ll carry out with a band that involves her partner, Ollan Christopher Bell (of the ‘70s soul group the Purely natural Four) and Canadian guitarist Anthony Reed.

Zakiyah Hooker (left) performs with her father, John Lee Hooker, in 1998.

The Detroit indigenous, who still left the metropolis for California in the mid-‘70s and now lives in Ga, explained she’s thrilled to arrive house for a tribute to her father in the metropolis wherever he designed his identify.

“When I bought the phrase from Vince, the first factor I said is that it is way overdue,” Hooker reported. “Detroit is in which (John Lee Hooker) became well known. It’s where by ‘Boogie Chillen’ place him on the map. I was definitely touched that they’ve taken the time to pull this together.”

Zakiya Hooker will acknowledge a crucial to the metropolis in honor of her father, who died in June 2001, presented by the office environment of Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. She mentioned a lot of the Hooker family is expected to attend, which include some of the late star’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Detroit Music Weekend’s John Lee Hooker tribute will be staged at Tunes Hall’s new amphitheater house, constructed very last 12 months on the venue’s former parking lot at Madison Avenue and Grand River Avenue. To begin with devised as a workaround amid pandemic limitations on indoor gatherings, the outside efficiency area is most likely to endure as a long-lasting fixture outside the house Music Corridor.

The July festivities will transpire just down the road from the onetime Hastings Street district where by Hooker plied his musical trade. Possessing migrated to Detroit in the early 1940s, drawn by a job with Ford, the Mississippi-bred bluesman became a staple of the city’s Black clubs though building a important transition to electrical guitar.

With his signature foot-pounding defeat and a seem that melded downhome Delta blues with urban urgency, Hooker grew to become a very hot Detroit draw. Recording for assorted labels — at times underneath aliases to sidestep present document contracts — he began to pile up hits, with his groundbreaking 1948 single “Boogie Chillen” foremost a catalog that grew to involve “Crawling King Snake,” “I’m in the Mood,” “Boom Increase,” “Dimples” and far more.

“I normally phone him the triple danger — good writer, great singer, fantastic guitarist,” claimed Paul. “That’s an strange blend. His voice was priceless. There’s a little something with quite a few of our great stars, where their voice resonates inside our bodies. And his is one of them. It somehow broke by way of your forehead and received inside of of you.”

By the time of his late-career resurgence in the 1990s, when he became the toast of the rock group, Hooker minimize just one of the most exclusive figures in the blues environment, his sharkskin satisfies, fedoras and wraparound shades producing for an unmistakable seem.

“John Lee Hooker was considerably and absent Detroit’s king of awesome,” reported Paul.

Detroit Tunes Weekend was released by Audio Hall in 2017, conceived as a way to honor the city’s greats with performances and other civic bells and whistles. The inaugural edition highlighted what turned out to be Aretha Franklin’s final hometown functionality — a two-working day Queen of Soul celebration that incorporated a ceremonial renaming of Madison Street (Aretha Franklin Way) and a critical to the town presented to Franklin by Duggan.

The 2018 DMW was headlined by the Jacksons, who executed and obtained a critical to the city. Immediately after skipping 2019, the fest returned in summertime 2020 with a scaled-down, socially distanced software of area functions, turning out to be the city’s very first major new music occasion after the onset of the pandemic.

Paul claimed he opted to commit this year’s party to Hooker immediately after learning previously this 12 months that the long-functioning Ann Arbor Blues Festival would be on hiatus.

“Suddenly there was a gap in the programming,” he claimed. “Why is not everyone executing a blues festival in Detroit? Then it just domino’d.”

His first phone was to regional blues powerhouse Davis (“a no-brainer,” he stated), adopted by LaVette. Both of those experienced prior commitments on July 9, Paul’s targeted fest day. So he moved the event up a week.

Next arrived Popovic, Owens and Neals — and all of a sudden, Paul found himself with a “women of the blues” theme.

“And then I figured I’d toss in a couple of fellas,” he stated.

Scott and company will close the out of doors occasion with a sprawling band that includes a horn section and battery of 20-plus musicians led by Brantley, the well-traveled bassist-keyboardist regarded for his touring operate with Girl Gaga and other individuals.

Brantley is also aiding decide on 6 young musicians who will perform as section of a juried showcase that day at Aretha’s Jazz Café inside of Songs Hall. Finalists will be announced in advance of the pageant.

Get hold of Detroit Absolutely free Press tunes writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or [email protected].