Anna Warr, Tucson hall of fame blues singer, dies at 52

Tucson powerhouse blues singer Anna Warr would greet friends and strangers alike with a hug.

Not a gratuitous peck-on-the-cheek kind of hug. She pulled you in tight against her 6-foot-1-inch frame and hugged the love into you.

“She wanted to make you feel. It was all about the feels,” longtime friend Liane Hernandez said Monday, a day after Warr died of a heart attack at Tucson Medical Center on Sunday, Jan. 15. The Tucson Musicians Museum and Arizona Blues halls of fame singer and mother of two was 52 years old.

“Anna was such a bright light. … There was something extra bright about her smile, her bigness as a performer. It was her energy as a performer that was so electric,” said fellow Tucson blues singer Heather “Lil Mama” Hardy, whose musical path crossed Warr’s a number of times over the past 25 years. “It’s always sad, but I think this one hit home for a lot of folks. ... She’s touched a lot of circles.”

Warr, who was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was adopted at 5 months old by Winston and Diana Warr, grew up in Tucson with three older siblings.

“Anna came into this world with a big voice and a big presence, and she never lost it. It only grew,” her mom recalled.

Although music was a constant in the house, it wasn’t until her junior year at Rincon High School that Warr showed any interest in singing in public. Her mom recalled that Warr auditioned to sing the National Anthem at school basketball games.

She won the audition, and the school’s choir director asked her afterward, “Where have you been all this time?” her mom recalled.

In her early 20s, Warr was working at several local restaurants and started entering karaoke contests. She won them so often that the bars encouraged her to stop entering and start doing music on her own.

Chris Davis of The Rowdies was the first to put her on stage, which led to an invite from Bobby Taylor, who helped her land her first weekly paying gig.

Her career took off. She found herself sharing the stage with some of Tucson’s best-known musicians including Brian Dean, Tony Uribe, Bad News Blues, Kevin Heiderman, Steve Grams, Danny Krieger, Richard Gomez, Marx Loeb, Chip Ritter and Larry Diehl.

She also was a regular with fellow Tucson blues singer Lisa Otey and the Desert Divas, which led to Warr touring abroad with Otey and Eric-Jan Overbeek, aka Mr. Boogie Woogie of the Netherlands, who has been a regular on Tucson stages for decades.

Warr’s day job was in the kitchens of a handful of Tucson restaurants, including working with her Art Institute of Tucson culinary program classmate Cecilia Arosemena’s Dish for Dosha juicing business, based out of the downtown YWCA.

She spent her nights and weekends on stage with a number of bands that she fronted over the years; for the last decade or so, she had been the lead vocalist for Giant Blue, headed by veteran Tucson rocker Mike Walden.

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When COVID shut all of the city’s venues in 2020, Warr joined Bad News Blues guitarist/vocalist Mike Blommer that summer for a series of Porch Rockers concerts in the driveway of Blommer’s east side home.

“Anna came about every weekend to sit in. She would arrive with a gigantic pot of something and she would feed everyone,” said Blommer’s wife, Danielle, who met Warr when she was inducted into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame in 2016. “It was the best summer of our lives.”

“My mom was a rock star, literally and figuratively,” said her 21-year-old son, Hiram S. Corbett II, who attended several of those driveway concerts. “If she wasn’t there, people were kind of bummed.”

Warr, who performed very little since tearing her ACL in a fall last summer, played her last show in early December. But it is a Club Congress show before her fall that sticks in her son’s memory.

“She was up there and all these people at Club Congress were screaming and whooping and excited,” he recalled. “I had gotten used to it, knowing that people are going to cheer for my mom, but seeing all these people revere my mother like she was Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross or Etta James ... was incredible. It was like watching a blues singer who has been on the stage for a long time.”

Warr had been in declining health since she was diagnosed with liver disease in 2015, her son said. When her husband, Tucson jazz saxophonist and Pima Community College music teacher Mike Kuhn, suffered a massive stroke at the beginning of COVID, it took an emotional and physical toll, Warr’s friends say. Kuhn is being treated in a rehabilitation center, family members said.

In early January, the family held a reunion, and Warr’s sister Amy, who lives in Austin, Texas, said everyone knew that was likely the last time they would see Anna. She had been awaiting a heart procedure that would have helped her breathe easier, her mother said, but the procedure was delayed for months to allow her knee to heal.

Arosemena, who roomed with Warr for a couple of years when both women were struggling single moms, said she believes Warr would want to be remembered for her life on stage and off.

“She wanted everybody to live, to love and remember her for the person that she was, not just the performer, but the person she was,” Arosemena said. “You can’t have a voice like that and a presence like that and not be a massive presence 24-7. She really did great in her life.”

In addition to her parents, sister and son, Warr is survived by her oldest son, Tyler Adler of North Carolina; two brothers, Carter Warr of Tucson and Winston Warr III of Juneau, Alaska; four grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.

In October 2021, Warr was reunited with her biological father, who lives in Texas, after taking a “23 and Me” DNA test. She met him in person last year and her son phoned him from Warr’s hospital room on Monday so that he could say goodbye, Diana Warr said.

Memorial services have not been set.