"Hey, everybody," she sang, as the band shuffled along behind her. "I've got news for you ...." Zakiya is a slight woman, not quite 5 feet tall, with a wide smile that reveals a colorful ring of braces. She was in the middle of her second set at Biscuits & Blues, performing as alter ego "Foxy Brown" after a costume change.
"I've paid my dues ...." Her show, thus far, had been light and bouncy: a few blues-rock standards, some straight R&B tunes, two or three soul numbers, almost all of them sung while negotiating the room's tables. She'd cracked menopause jokes and kept up a breezy patter with the bass player, her husband. Couples had swayed to the ballads. Women had jiggled during the upbeat stuff. Then came this song -- "It's very appropriate for me," she said by way of introduction -- and the show, for a moment, turned personal.
"I've got a receipt," intoned a daughter of John Lee Hooker, "to sing the blues."
Zakiya Hooker-Bell is 55 years old, an Oakland resident, and a jury services manager at Alameda County Superior Court, moonlighting at the other end of the blues diaspora. And now, two years after Hooker's death, her career is getting caught up in the wake of her father's. Zakiya plans to quit her job next year and devote herself full time to her music. (She's cutting a third album now.) Meanwhile, she will continue to handle her father's estate and his posthumous career. (She and her husband, Ollan Christopher Bell, are working on a double album of Hooker's outtakes.)
The idea, for both her own music and her father's, is to avoid suffocating the blues behind museum glass, to let it shift and expand: a funk bass line on her cover of a Robert Johnson standard, maybe a hip hop vocal on a John Lee Hooker track. This sort of thing -- alloys and odd fusions -- is a blues tradition. It's also a risk, a potential turnoff to people who see the name Hooker and expect the trademarks: a homburg hat, a guitar drone, and a foot stomp. And, for Zakiya, it's certainly a challenge. She is both heir to and caretaker of her father's legacy, a woman well into midlife but relatively new to music, a torch singer with a thin voice, a Hooker just now learning to play the guitar.
Of Hooker's eight children, six of them daughters and most of them scattered around California, Zakiya looks the most like her father; she has the long eyes, the flare of the nose, the fuzzy hair. She still calls him "Daddy," except when she's talking about him as a musician, in which case he's often "John Lee Hooker." He asked her to handle the estate, Zakiya says, because he saw that she was "most like him," that she'd be "fair and evenhanded." On June 21, 2001, Hooker died in his sleep at his home in Los Altos. She wrote a letter to him in the program for his memorial service: "Thank you for being the Golden Thread that has held the family together." She also wrote all but one of the notes from her siblings. (She is one of seven children by Hooker's second wife.)
As a courthouse employee and sometime musician, Zakiya was a natural choice to handle Hooker's estate. But 20 years ago, she was far from her father's line of work, a single woman with three kids and a different name. She didn't even start singing the blues until the early '90s. By then she had just two kids, one of them in prison, and plenty of material.
Born Vera Lee Hooker in 1948 -- and named for a great-aunt she never met -- she married at 19, had three sons, and separated at 27. (Her husband, Glenn Thomas, later died of an apparent drug overdose.) She and her boys, Glenn, Maurice, and John, left Detroit for Oakland in the mid-'70s; they spent a month at her father's house, then found a small apartment and went on welfare. She first worked a desk in personnel at the Oakland Police Department and eventually got a job on the 27th floor of the Kaiser building, greeting the vice presidents' visitors. Zakiya refused to ask her father for help. When one of her sons wanted to sign up for a high school engineering program in Alabama, she just scaled back and saved the money. "I was really averse to asking my father for anything," Zakiya says. "I was very independent." Glenn occasionally spent the weekend at his grandfather's house in Redwood City; when Hooker would have to run off for a gig, he'd hand Glenn $300 and grumble, "Don't say nothin' to your mother."
"She was not asking her father for handouts," says Glenn, now executive director of the nascent John Lee Hooker Foundation, which will offer music programs for Bay Area schoolchildren. "I know, because some nights we ate rice."
Zakiya started working in the courts in 1984, and soon became interested in her African heritage. A judge gave her a book of African names, and it wasn't until three months later, once she had read to the Z's, that she found a new name. "Za-kee-uh," she pronounces it now. "It was the sound. It's a musical sound, a rhythmic sound." It means "intelligence" in Swahili; "pure" and "exonerated" in Hebrew.
She told her father about the name change. "He just asked me one thing: 'Are you gonna change your last name, too?'" Zakiya says.
""No, Daddy. It's gonna stay Hooker.'"
In 1987, she met her second husband, Ollan Christopher Bell, a founder of the Oakland soul group the Natural Four; now he was producing. Ollan invited her to the studio one day, heard her singing along and holding the harmony, and stuck her behind a microphone, doing background vocals. They married a few years later, and in 1991, Zakiya sang her first onstage duet with her father and dived into her debut album. She doesn't measure her professional career by these milestones, though. Talking to Ollan, fumbling for the date she started to sing, she asks him, "When did John pass?"
In November 1991, her son John died from injuries sustained in a car collision. (A few months later, Maurice was convicted of sexual assault.) Not long after John's death, Zakiya returned to the studio. Her first day back, she worked on a song called "Mean Mean World," a duet with her father (who, at his namesake's funeral, was too heartbroken to even leave his car). It's a bleak, formless song, with a slashed three-note guitar riff, and it's probably the closest Zakiya's music gets to her father's brand of blues. "If I can't have you, baby," she sings, "I'm gonna go shopping, baby ... for my tombstone."
Zakiya's music is in many ways the logical product of a woman who grew up a bluesman's daughter in Detroit, getting her cheeks pinched by B.B. King, saving her nickels to see the Temptations at the Graystone Ballroom; a woman who moved to a coast known for its jazzier blues, who married a tenor and bass player once on Curtis Mayfield's label. Both her albums, Another Generation of the Blues (1992) and Flavors of the Blues (1997), offer a mix of styles. They're mood swings, in a way, from a kick in the crotch ("Don't put your key in my door, 'cause your key don't work no more") to a swoon on top of violins ("I just drown, drown, in your love"), in just six tracks.
"I'm a torch singer," she says, "and I know I'm a torch singer. Maybe I'm just a sad soul inside. I just love that kind of music. I love a love song -- love lost, love found."
A few years ago at the Yale Hotel in Vancouver, a young guy stood up during her show and slurred, "Sing some blues." Zakiya shot him a look. "I say, 'What do you know about the blues?'" she recalls. "'You're a baby. Go home, and suck on your mama's breast.'"
And he disappeared.
"I just have issues," she continues, "with people trying to define what the blues is. I have my interpretation of the blues. Everyone has their own interpretation of the blues."
"I guarantee," says her son Glenn, "if my mother was fat and not attractive, they would say she's a blues artist. If she's not a blues artist, tell me what is a blues artist."
Still, neither one of her albums fared well -- decent sales in Europe, Zakiya says, but shrugs back home. Another Generation, on a London-based label, was never released in the States. Flavors, on her father's Virgin imprint, wasn't promoted. Glenn thinks his grandfather could've done more to help her out. Toward the end of Hooker's career, when he was touring with the Coast to Coast Blues Band, a petite redhead named Vala Cupp would perform as the warm-up act. There'd always be a duet of his "Crawlin' King Snake," a set piece of the show, and Cupp would flutter around Hooker in his chair, swapping lines with him. Then she'd close the song with what one writer described as a "daughterly" peck on his cheek.
Says Glenn: "My grandfather never said, 'You're my daughter -- you go on the road and open up for me.' That would've helped her out more. It upset her, I know it did."
Zakiya says she has tried not to trade on the family name, a pitfall that claims many children of successful musicians, perhaps especially children of the blues, which is considered -- often falsely -- to be a music born out of unique circumstance. All the same, she may have also created certain musical expectations by calling her first album Another Generation of the Blues. "When you have a famous father," says her manager, Eugene Skuratowicz, "people will tend to at least say hello and listen to what you have. But there's also a reverse side. People think, 'Goodness gracious, here's a person just trying to ride [on the name].'" At her show in February, her father was mentioned only once, during Ollan's introduction as she took the stage: " ... by way of Detroit ... by way of her father, John Lee Hooker ...."
"I've got a name," she says now. "My name is Zakiya Hooker. It's not Daughter-of-John-Lee-Hooker Zakiya Hooker. It's Zakiya."
Of her siblings, Zakiya has ventured furthest into the music world. Her brother John is playing gigs now, with the John Lee Hooker Jr. Blues Band. (He didn't want to comment for this story.) Robert gave up a promising career as a keyboardist for the church (no comment, either). A cousin, Archie Lee, put out a few CDs as a singer (including New Church of the Blues in 2002).
"[John] has the name -- the crown jewel," Zakiya says. "My struggle is a little bit harder, because I don't have the name, and I'm a female. People take him a little more seriously. He's more apt to get a gig before I do. But I've actually been out there in the storm. I've put CDs out there. I've been prey for the critics.
"I figure I'm a great entertainer, and eventually people will realize it."
Her shows, in fact, are as big a part of her music career as her albums. She has an easy, confident stage manner, spending little time in front of the audience, preferring instead to wander the tables and wink at friends. Before a performance in Canada a few years ago, Zakiya's longtime guitarist, Tony Cook, spotted a big Hells Angel near the dressing room, and, remembering a few previous run-ins with members of the motorcycle group, thought, Oh, God. Soon, Zakiya took the stage. The first thing she said was something like, "I see we have some Hells Angels in the crowd," then she launched into a story about her father's bodyguard, a Hells Angel. "The guy went crazy," Cook recalls. "From that moment, you could do no wrong."
Offstage, Zakiya comes across as quiet, almost shy; onstage, she'll wear an Afro and call herself "Foxy Brown" for an entire set. She's considering a new stage character, too. The costume: a homburg, a suit, and a pair of sunglasses.
John Lee Hooker was born in 1917 outside of Clarksdale, Miss., in the cradle of the Delta blues. His stepfather, Will Moore, was a musician from Shreveport, La. -- where the favored style was a formless one-chord vamp -- and when Moore moved to Mississippi, he'd play parties with blues forefathers Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Hooker learned guitar from his stepfather, but he developed the thick, dramatic singing style of a Mississippi bluesman. He had Louisiana in his hands, and the Delta in his throat.
Hooker moved to Detroit in 1943, and five years later recorded "Boogie Chillen." The song was a droning boogie on an electric guitar, bouncing above the thump of Hooker's foot -- simultaneously urban and backcountry. It closed with a spoken monologue: "One night I was layin' down. I heard Mama and Papa talkin'. I heard Papa tell Mama to "let that boy boogie-woogie. 'Cause it's in him, and it's got to come out.'" From there, he recorded under different names for different labels: Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam, Johnny Williams, The Boogie Man, John L. Booker, Johnny Lee, John Lee, and Sir John Lee Hooker. His songs were not diaries of metaphysical apocalypse, like Robert Johnson's. Some were violent; some merely sounded violent. Most were dance numbers.
Hooker's music changed over the years: In 1962, he recorded "Boom Boom," a stop-time rhythm-and-blues fuck song (recently used in a Gap commercial), and his sound began to creep into the riffs of British guitarists. In the 1970s, he worked with the white-blues band Canned Heat. Soon, his blues could be found in any 12 bars of ZZ Top. He moved to Northern California, and his reputation faded until the 1989 release of The Healer, featuring the likes of Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and Robert Cray. Similar albums followed: Hooker would howl a few bars into the dense production, then hang back while Santana took a guitar solo. "He revived a lot of careers," Zakiya says. "He has been a steppingstone for a lot of people. A doormat for some, a steppingstone for others."
At the time of his death, Hooker was working on an album of unreleased tracks tentatively titled End of the World Blues, now the double album of outtakes that Zakiya and her husband are remastering. And there are other plans to keep his name alive. For Hooker's birthday in August, the John Lee Hooker Foundation hopes to co-host a benefit concert with the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation. Skuratowicz, Zakiya's manager and the Hooker estate's manager, says he'd also like to put together an album of bootlegs. (The timing of these efforts is good; 2003 is the so-called Year of the Blues -- as proclaimed by the U.S. Senate and sponsored by Volkswagen -- celebrating the 100th anniversary of W.C. Handy's supposed introduction to the music on a Mississippi train platform.)
"Everything Zakiya and I have planned," Skuratowicz says, "is so that John won't be in the dustbins, with the reduced-rate things."
Ollan and Zakiya live in a mint-green house with pink trim, just a few unlit blocks from the Coliseum. An airless, low-ceilinged recording studio lies behind a thick door at the base of the house. Upstairs, in a small, carpeted room, Ollan sits in front of two computer screens, one of them alive with pistoning colored bars.
He and two other musicians -- Tony Cook and Gregg Crockett -- are working on a preliminary version of "Mean Mean World" for the album of outtakes. It's largely the same stark blues that Hooker recorded with his daughter a decade ago. Today, they're tacking on a brief guitar part. Earlier, they added synthesized strings, with a few pizzicato fills, and Hooker's mumbled introduction to the song: "It's a slow-going thing. It's about what's happenin' today. It will be happenin' maybe four or five years from today. Until things get down ... mellow ... all over the world."
"Is that deep shit?" Ollan says.
For the album, the challenge is to touch up songs that were deemed unusable, without straying too far from their spirit. Ollan handles the first part; Zakiya, the second. He tinkers with the music during the day, then runs it by Zakiya when she returns from work. The songs are mostly the residue of Hooker's late-career resurgence, and the plan is to eventually bring in a few big-name musicians to record guest spots. There's even the idea, Skuratowicz says, of getting a hip hop act to sing a duet, with the hope that it will expand Hooker's posthumous audience. He won't give out any names, saying only that he wants "someone who's positive, who's an African-American star today in what is called urban music."
After working on "Mean Mean World," Ollan moves on to "Wednesday Evening Blues," which Hooker recorded with George Thorogood on guitar: "She left me that Wednesday evening" -- which, in Hooker's mouth, sounds like wedeeeing -- "Lord, when the sun was sinkin' low." It's a rough song, bearing some of Hooker's trademarks: He stomps his foot throughout, often wandering from the beat, and he sings chord changes he doesn't play on the guitar. "I thought we were gonna try to do the authentic outdoor thing, with the birds and the cows?" Crockett asks Ollan. At one point, apparently, Ollan had considered adding natural sound effects, the kinds of things you might hear on a Mississippi porch.
"Oh, no, no," he says. "Zakiya said to forget the birds and crickets and shit. She said her daddy wasn't into no damn birds and chickens."
Right now, Crockett is trying to lay down a bass line (using a one-of-its-kind acoustic bass that Ollan bought in Amsterdam, maxing out his credit card). He's playing into a microphone out in the hallway, fumbling for the changes, speeding up or slowing down with the music. The problem, it quickly becomes clear, is the foot stomp, which gets jittery during Thorogood's solo, then starts to lag during a later verse.
"There's gonna be a time," Ollan says, "when we have to take the foot out."
Or, Crockett suggests, they could let the computer fix it. "Chop it up, and put it in correct time," he says. For now, though, they crank up the drum a bit, muffling the sound of the foot. And within an hour, they have a workable version of the song, sitting on a brand-new bass line. Ollan punches a few keys and plays it back.
"That's the shit," he says.
"That's sweet," he says a moment later.
"That," he finally declares of "Wednesday Evening Blues," a song featuring the guy who did "Bad to the Bone," a $2,000 bass from Amsterdam, and perhaps a digitally corrected foot stomp, "is the Delta blues."
Zakiya sang as a kid, and as a mother she would peck out children's songs on the piano; she never bothered to learn the guitar, though. Almost 30 years ago, her father returned from a trip to Spain with a gorgeous acoustic, a gift to his daughter. He tried to teach her how to play, but it never took. "I thought, "This is for men -- women don't play guitars,'" she says. "And I just didn't have time. I was too busy. I had the children, I was busy trying to get on with my life, and I didn't realize what he was trying to give me.
"That's so sad that as young people we don't realize what our elders are trying to give us, and it's just sheer ignorance that makes us not accept it."
During a recent rehearsal, though, she started kidding around with her guitarists. There must be a million of you fucking guitar players in the world, she sneered at them. Everybody's a guitar player. The acoustic from her father was lying nearby. "I just picked it up, and I just started strumming on it," Zakiya recalls. One of the guys said she looked good. "So I started piddling around with it," she says, "and I found that I really liked it."
Zakiya has three guitars -- a baby Taylor, her father's acoustic, and one electric -- and she's thinking about buying a small, cheap one she can play at work. What she really wants, though, is a Gibson or an Epiphone, the guitars her father always used. "If I'm gonna play onstage," she says, "that's what I wanna play. I wanna play what he played." And she's getting better. Zakiya practices daily, tries to attend a weekly lesson, and pops in a how-to DVD when she has a chance. She strums in bed at night, and she's proud of the calluses on her fingers. She's learning new chords all the time -- new styles, too.
"Matter of fact," she says, "I'm playing a boogie-woogie now."
The first time she played onstage, at the February Biscuits & Blues show, Zakiya learned three chords for a song called "Dirty Things." Her guitar was tuned to a "D," an easy arrangement for a beginner. "They said, 'OK, pretty much all you have to do is strum, but you've got to make these changes,'" Zakiya says. The crowd had thinned out a little by that point. A band member passed her a red electric guitar, and she lassoed the strap over her Afro and around her neck, then launched into the song. She didn't look comfortable; the guitar seemed heavy, and she sort of chopped at the strings with her thumb.
"But I memorized those changes," she says, "and I made 'em."
