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""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."
