Henry's Swing Club

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Henry's Swing Club was one of the small nightclubs that lined Hastings Street, the main entertainment strip of Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood, in the years after John Lee Hooker moved to the city in 1943 to work in its auto plants. Hooker made the club's name famous far beyond Detroit when he opened his first hit record, 1948's "Boogie Chillen'," with the line about walking down Hastings Street and passing "a place they call Henry's Swing Club." The song reached number one on the R&B chart in 1949 and turned Hooker into a national star, giving the small club an outsized place in blues history. No exact street address for Henry's Swing Club survives in the historical record. Like the rest of Hastings Street, it was gone by around 1960, when the city cleared the corridor to build the Chrysler Freeway, now Interstate 375.

1. A Hastings Street nightclub in Black Bottom, Detroit's Black community's entertainment district
2. Named in the opening lines of John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen'" (1948)
3. "Boogie Chillen'" hit number one on the R&B chart in 1949
4. Demolished with the rest of Hastings Street for the Chrysler Freeway around 1960