You can add a catchy new name to Michigan’s fast-growing roster of summer music festivals:
Oakaloosa.
After a couple of weeks of cryptic online teases, details are being announced for the inaugural rock, pop and hip-hop event to be held July 27 at Historic Fort Wayne, the riverside park about 2 miles west of the Ambassador Bridge.
On tap for the 12-hour, two-stage fest are a pair of national headliners — mashup king Girl Talk and veteran rap outfit Bone Thugs-n-Harmony — alongside an array of local talent that includes Royce da 5’9’’, Jessica Hernandez, Trick Trick, Kaleido and Robert James, stage name for Robert Ritchie Jr., the 19-year-old son of Kid Rock.
Also on the bill are DJ A.M.F., Ro Spit, Hir-O, Freddy Todd and Paulina Jane. About 10 more acts will be announced in coming weeks, with booking managed by Detroit music impresario Mikey Eckstein.
Tickets are $45 and are scheduled to go on sale Tuesday at 8 a.m. at www.oakaloosa.com.
The event will be produced by Detroit Sports Zone, a nonprofit group founded in 2011 to run sports and culture mentoring programs. Organizers are working with the Detroit Recreation Department, which oversees the fort site.
Organizers are billing Oakaloosa as “the region’s first fully philanthropic music festival,” with some proceeds to be earmarked for restoration efforts at Fort Wayne, the 19th-Century site that housed troops during the Civil War and military vehicles during World War I.
The fest’s moniker was inspired by a misspelled soldier’s name spotted by organizers at an online Fort Wayne archive.
“It just looked very good visually,” said festival marketing director Adrian Pittman.
One stage will be situated on the riverfront athletic fields, said Pittman, while the main stage will be inside the fort itself, where barracks and other buildings are in various conditions.
“It came to represent this idea of being very creative and wild and open and new with this concept,” he said. “We’re taking a variety of musical categories and blending them together into one lineup. We really want to encourage this cross-pollination of groups — something we can really own locally, not a boilerplate, cookie-cutter kind of eve