NEWS

John Lee Hooker was working as a janitor in Detroit when he released his first hit single “Boogie Chillen” in 1948. The rest is history. That history is being celebrated at this year’s Detroit Music Weekend festival.

The free, all-day-long festival is on July 2 at the Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts.

Hooker was a blues guitar player who made the rounds at bars and clubs on Hastings Street back in the day when it was Paradise Valley. He is considered a master and originator of the electric guitar-style adaptation of the Delta blues.

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Detroit’s dean of the blues is set to be honored with a special summer tribute, including a posthumous key to the city.

The late bluesman John Lee Hooker will be celebrated by local and visiting performers at the latest edition of Detroit Music Weekend, scheduled July 2 outside Music Hall.

The free festival will feature a daylong lineup of artists performing 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 close the evening with an all-star jam that includes Kern Brantley, Howard Glazer and Harmonica Shah. Tosha Owens and Eliza Neals also fill the bill.

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This year’s Detroit Music Weekend on July 2 will honor the blues, with a tribute to the late John Lee Hooker and a “Women of the Blues” showcase with his daughter Zakiya Hooker and others.

Taking place on July 2 at the amphitheater outside Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, Detroit Music Weekend is a free event. It kicked off in 2017 with a performance and tribute to Aretha Franklin.

Zakiya Hooker will accept a Key to the City on behalf of her father, a Mississippi native who came to Detroit for work in the 1940s where he became popular in the local clubs. The story goes that the guitarist was working as a janitor in Detroit when his best-selling single, “Boogie Chillen,” was released.

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