It’s the middle of the morning, not the middle of the night. There’s no dimly lit, smoke-filled room. There is nothing, in fact, to suggest the hard livin’ land of the blues.
But teens in the music room at Sunrise Middle School still try to get in the mood. They tap their feet, rock back and forth. On guitars and harmonicas, they feel their way through a tune.
“After a while, the blues is just whatever comes naturally,” explains their special instructor, Chicago-area blues musician and historian Fruteland Jackson. He sings a melody as students strum the notes that form the eternal engine of the blues, repetitive and soothing as the distant chugging of a train.
“You got me runnin’
You got me hidin’
You got me runnin’, hidin’, hidin’, runnin’,
Anywhere you want me to go,
Let it roll!
Oooooooooooooo!
You got me doin’ what you want,
Tell me what you want me to do.”
Jackson likes to say he didn’t find the blues, the blues found him. Now he’s trying to return the favor, sharing America’s first popular form of music with the next generation through the program Blues in the Schools.
His young audience wouldn’t know B.B. King if it weren’t for Burger King commercials. They might never guess most radio music–R&B, soul, rock, alternative and ska, to name a few–can trace its origins to the down-home music born out of the mouths of slaves working the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Thus the phrase, “The blues is the roots, everything else is the fruits.”
The blues is “not just some old man on a stump singing, ‘My Woman Done Left Me This Mornin,’ ” Jackson explains.
Traveling to schools in the United States, Canada and overseas, Jackson has seen firsthand that the blues can break barriers internal and external, racial and social. He has seen, he says, problem students find success, the shy find self-confidence, the musically uneducated find acceptance, and the classically schooled find soul.
“The early musicians didn’t have a lot of education. They didn’t know anything about a flattened fifth [note] and a minor sharp. They improvised,” he says to the class during their second week of lessons. “It’s a form of freedom. You can play what you want. You don’t have to get hit by a bus to play the blues.”
“I didn’t pick cotton,” adds Jackson, 50, a college graduate born in Mississippi who has held jobs ranging from restaurant manager to licensed private investigator.
He stresses the link between education and music, assigning mini book reports and asking students to write a song. “If your dog ate your homework,” he says matter-of-factly, “bring your dog.”
Jackson is slowly making converts of the class.
“I like the music. You understand what people go through, they sing about their life,” says Pierre R., 13. “It makes you relax. If you have anger inside of you, you sing it and you become peaceful.”
Seventh grader Roldy R. is entranced. “It has a whole lot of history. It’s like I belong there,” he says.
The program, funded through a non-profit agency, gives students a mere taste of the music. In a packed, two-week period, Jackson teaches them 12 simple blues bars and a few songs, including a boogie-woogie.
Jackson knows that most of the students won’t fully “get” the blues in such a short time. Some won’t hit the notes. Others won’t grasp the passion beneath them–joy and pain, loss and sorrow. These are things the students are just starting to learn on their journey to adulthood. When they fully understand them, live them, Jackson hopes the blues will be there, waiting like an old friend.
“It’s repose for the soul, serenity for the troubled mind,” he says, his voice rich as his music. “The blues lets you know you’re not alone. Someone has been where you’re going.”
For information about Blues in the Schools, check out www.blues-in-the-schools.org/.
