Chris Cain stepped up to the microphone, holding his guitar across his chest and looked down P Street at the ZooFest crowd and glanced at the Zoo Bar that he’d just been in for the first time in decades. “I haven’t been here in way too long,” Cain said. "It’s very emotional for me.
We’re going to play some blues for you.” And play the blues his band did for more than an hour, celebrating his return and the Zoo Bar’s 51st anniversary. But in unstated fashion, Cain and the rest of the Fourth of July ZooFest lineup celebrated what Dave Alvin called in song “American Music” — Louisiana boogie, Delta blues, country swing, rockabilly, jazz, country western, Chicago blues — the roots music stew that has been cooking at the Zoo since 1973.
“It’s roots music,” said Zoo owner Pete Watters. “Today’s pretty blues heavy. People think is a blues bar.
But it's more a roots music bar. We have a brass band Saturday, rockabilly Saturday night. When we have country it’s usually traditional country.
That’s the stuff all of us have been interested in.” Even though Thursday’s lineup was blues heavy, the genre and stylist lines were blurred throughout the afternoon and evening. Blues Project, that band that preceded Cain, did a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).
” Cain, whose impressive guitar work is jazz-inflected, moved to the piano to do a double keyboard number – “I saw Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder do this on television,.
