DALLAS -- Funeral services will be Thursday for blues singer Arzell 'Z.Z.' Hill Sr., whose straightforward soul-blues style of crooning brought him a resurgence of popularity in the last three years.
Services will be in Hughes Springs, a community 150 miles east of Dallas, with burial at a cemetery in nearby Naples, his East Texas birthplace.
Hill died in a Dallas hospital last Friday of a heart attack. He was 48.
In the last three years, since signing with Malaco Records of Jackson, Miss., Hill had come to national prominence in blues circles. Billboard magazine recently called him a 'master of the genre' of straightforward soul-blues crooning.
His most recent album, 'Down Home,' became one of the biggest-selling blues albums in history, and Hill has had a popular hit with the single, 'Down Home Blues.' Hill credited his success to a return to his early blues and 1960s soul roots, evident since he signed with the Mississippi label.
'When disco came through it wiped the blues right off the map,' he recently told The Dallas Morning News. 'All the bands, even the local bands, had to go with disco. Everybody wanted to hear it. And that was from 1974 clean up to 1980. It knocked a lot of people out.
'It almost knocked me out. I was just hanging on by a thread. Then we decided that, hey, maybe there still is an audience for that deep, deep soul music, that pure rhythm and blues sound. It worked. It just clicked.'
Hill is survived by his wife, Vivian, a son, two daughters, two brothers, a sister and one granddaughter.
