Music Crosses Over at the House of Blues

Legal secretary Rosa Harris, who sang the blues for an audience of junior-high students and pre-school parents. Photo by Jennifer Roche

It’s half an hour before lunchtime at Chicago’s House of Blues, and Rosa Harris, microphone in hand and voice fully loaded, paces back and forth across the darkened stage. On break from her job as a legal secretary, she’s singing the blues and sharing its history with an audience of junior-high students and preschool parents. The seventh and eighth graders from a suburban parochial school wear big gym shoes and baggy pants. They lean way back in their wooden folding chairs – cool and disinterested-like – but every one of them watches Harris while the parents wave their arms in the air and smile delightedly at the lesson.

It’s a tall musical order to convey the history and nuances of the blues in under an hour-and-a-half, but this is Blues SchoolHouse, a core program of the nonprofit International House of Blues Foundation (IHOBF). They’ve been meeting the challenge since 1993.

IHOBF Executive Director Susan K. Jauron says that the notion of creating a “schoolhouse” was part of the House of Blues (HOB) entertainment corporation’s plan from day one “Before the first HOB opened in Cambridge, (Founder) Isaac Tigretts was talking about the foundation and about using the House of Blues as a classroom where young communities could come and learn about the history of this country through folk art and music. That was absolutely his vision.”

The foundation emerged soon after the first HOB opened, with a vision statement that echoed Tigretts’ dream: promote cultural understanding and creative expression through music and art. By 2003, Blues SchoolHouse and IHOBF had hosted more than 40,000 students and teachers, and it was operating out of six HOB venues: Las Vegas, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Orlando and Chicago.

Rosa Harris and the Dreams Come True band roll through West African rhythms, a bit of Bob Marley’s "Jammin’" and excerpts from Celia Cruz’s work. Cruz, Harris explains, sings in a call-and-response pattern, which is a traditional element of the blues. Another band member takes the microphone and commands the crowd,

“When I say ‘house of,’ you say ‘blues.’ When I say ‘house of,’ you say ‘blues.’”

“House of!” he shouts.

“Blues!” yells the audience.

“House of!”

“Blues!”

Many of the kids lean forward in their seats while Dreams Come True whirls through field hollers, the importance of W.C. Handy (the first black man to write and publish blues music), Ma Rainey, Thomas Dorsey, Little Richard and James Brown. By the time they get to Jimi Hendrix, HOB’s fog machine has shrouded the audience, laser lights ping off the walls, and one of the visiting parents has stepped on stage to belt out an Aretha Franklin hit. By the concert’s end, the audience has journeyed from Middle Passage to Patti LaBelle, and many more of them have climbed on stage to sing their favorite songs, show off their rap talents, and enjoy the spirit and life of American music.

Front Porch, House of Blues, Chicago. Copyright 2004 HOB Entertainment, Inc.

Today’s SchoolHouse is as much about the musical experience as it is about visiting the House of Blues. The venue’s interior vibrates with a charming, roadhouselike mayhem of color, pattern and folk motifs painted by artists Brent Spears and Holly Mandot. Discarded, decorated shoes “walk” toe-to-toe across the walls and ceilings, and hand-painted signs by British artist Tim Jourdan help maintain order. One reads, “While entering and exiting our house, please be quiet, be cool, and have some respect for our neighbors. Help Ever. Hurt Never.”

This unique environment flowed from Tigretts’ desire to create an authentic-feeling atmosphere for HOB’s concerts and for the extensive folk-art collection he fostered. Numbering more than 5,000 pieces nationwide (and growing), the folk collection is among the largest displayed publicly in the U.S. It plays an important part of the SchoolHouse experience. Before every SchoolHouse concert, students and teachers receive a guided tour of the collection.

Jauron explains, “Much of it, if not the entire collection, was created by African Americans from the southern United States. It reflects the culture similar to the culture that blues grew out of.” Chicago displays more than 700 works and represents what HOB curator Scott Smith calls “the cream of the crop” of the corporate collection.

During their preconcert tour, some of the junior-high students look at Mary Proctor’s piece called "Sticks and Stones." It’s a depiction of a black, nondescript figure reaching toward the sky. The figure’s coat and hat are made literally of sticks and stones. The words “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. (That’s a lie)” are painted flatly and simply along the figure’s side.

The guide, IHOBF employee Erin Teegarden, tells the students that Proctor was a missionary who lost her family in a fire, and then, in the sorrow and aftermath of the tragedy, received an inspiration to paint. Teegarden prompts the students to discover the materials Proctor used and to notice the discarded door upon which she painted the figure.

The students stop again before the intensely present art of Roy Ferdinand. In one of his pieces, viewers look down the barrel of a presumably loaded gun. The would-be assailant stands on a street corner. He wears a Malcolm X hat and a peace sign on a chain around his neck. Teegarden encourages the students to name some of the contradictions and emotions in the work. She also points out that Ferdinand used ordinary art supplies – ball-point pens, colored pencils, crayons and markers – that could easily be found in a drug store. In this way, she spurs the students to think about their own creative possibilities as well as those intended by Ferdinand.

“Sometimes it’s really moving to be here,” Teegarden says later. “With some of the artists, the children can relate to their messages and it teaches them about things they’re dealing with in their own lives.”

IHOBF Program Director Francine Pope. Photo by Jennifer Roche

Chicago’s IHOBF Program Director Francine L. Pope concurs that the impact of Blues SchoolHouse extends far beyond the didactic portion of the tour and concert. Pope frequently receives letters from parents and teachers thanking her for the moments of meaning, large and small, that their kids derived from their experience. Sometimes, Pope says, the composition of the audience might introduce new realizations for the students. For example, once students from Barrington (a wealthy, predominantly white suburb) shared the audience with African-American students from a poorer city school while another time students from one city school shared the audience with cognitively challenged kids from another.

“We work very successfully with lots of different groups,” says Pope. “It’s a nice mixture. Music crosses over everything. You don’t need to already be educated about it. Kids come here and they shine. You start seeing the power of music and art.”

IHOBF created a thorough classroom guide and a learning center on their website to accompany the SchoolHouse. The guide and site reinforce the educational goals of the programs and offer background material, lecture points, artist and musician profiles, glossaries and learning activities such as art projects. It’s intended to be a highly flexible resource for instructors to incorporate the SchoolHouse experience into their classrooms. In addition, each IHOBF location offers myriad other options for students and teachers, including Martin Luther King Day celebrations and events, art and music workshops, a visiting-artists program and an off-site version of the SchoolHouse, which reached an additional 12,000 students in 2003.  

Shortly after Pope settled into her role as Chicago’s Program Director in 1998, Washburn, a local guitar manufacturer, contacted her. They were looking for a way to give back to the community, and they wanted to find an organization to work with. Pope and her program coordinator (and musician) Sandra Antongiorgi put together a pilot program for teaching students guitar in Chicago’s public schools. Washburn provided guitars, and IHOBF provided instructor contacts and support to the school. The pilot was so successful that within two years IHOBF and Washburn had taken the program national. By 2003, more than 600 students had participated, and the “Make an Impression” program became another of IHOBF’s core offerings.

Make an Impression Guitar Program. Courtesy of IHOBF

Paul Revere School, a Make an Impression participant on Chicago’s South Side, just let out for the afternoon and kids are percolating through the halls. Upstairs, in the century-old wing, five students, ages ten through 12, take their seats in a corner of an enormous classroom. They’re warming up on their guitars with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Their instructor, Larry Blasingaine, a slight, bespectacled man wears a leather cap and speaks softly. “I don’t have kids,” he says. “These are my children.”

They tune their guitars together and then flip through their Mel Bay songbooks (another IHOBF partner) looking for the ones they know and setting out to play them. Carl Knight, age 12, demonstrates his jazzed up version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," after which Anthony Richmond, age 11, shares his skill at playing "Frolic," the song also known as “Dueling Banjos” from the movie "Deliverance." The class then divides in two and plays the “dueling” parts with Brittany Owens, age 11, and Jamerrio Pondexter, age 10, joining in. When ten-year old Mariah Driver asks to play her version of the song, Blasingaine says, “She transposed the rhythms on her own. She asked if she could do 1/8th notes. I was amazed. They’re able to come up with their own ideas.”

Downstairs and across the hall Tyree Grant, Pavillie Simpson, Cleola Thomas, Jerry Thomas, Tyree Watson and Zhyon Wilson sit in a circle around their teacher, percussionist Isabelino Landor, while the remains of winter sunlight filter through the classroom’s giant windows. The children play a Puerto Rican rhythm called a bomba sica on four conga drums, a cowbell and a maraca. Landor, whom Pope located through Chicago’s Puerto Rican Segundo Ruiz Belvis Culture Center, encourages his students gently, “You’re falling off rhythm. Let’s remember tempo. Every musician has to learn to follow the beat.” The children comply and prepare for their next rhythm, a tumbao, which they tell their visitor, originated in Cuba. They’ve been part of a Make an Impression pilot program in percussion for fewer than six weeks.

Blues Schoolhouse. Courtesy of IHOBF

Not surprisingly, Blues SchoolHouse and Make an Impression are enormously popular programs. IHOBF provides the Schoolhouse and accompanying resources to schools for free. The schools need only sign up, provided IHOBF has space for them. “One of our challenges,” reports Pope, “is that Blues SchoolHouse is booked for months. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to schools. They’ll come one year and want to return, but we don’t always have room for that.” Jauron concurs, “We have incredible demand for our programs. (It) outstrips our ability to provide them.”

For the Make an Impression program, IHOBF provides organizational oversight, site visits, instructor resources and instruments (frequently, but not always, through corporate partners). Students also get to play together on stage at the House of Blues each spring, something they look forward to all year. In return, schools must complete an application process that requires them to show how, where and when they intend to use the program within their curriculum, and they must demonstrate how they will pay for the instructors.

For example, Paul Revere benefits from the generosity of their former student and Lands’ End founder Gary Comer. He supports the Make an Impression program through his Comer Science and Educational Foundation. As a result, students at Revere receive guitar and percussion lessons two days a week in their after-school program, and a second group of students receives lessons the other two days of the week. This number and frequency of classes far exceeds what other schools in Chicago are able to provide for their students, if they’re able to afford the programs at all. Pope and Jauron both say they’d like to do more for the schools with lesser means. “I guess our biggest challenge is getting more resources,” says Pope. “We’ve got the programming.”

To be sure, IHOBF’s close alliance with HOB affords it many advantages that some nonprofits can only dream of. They lend the foundation its concert space, allow extensive access to its art collection, and provide key overhead plums like office space, e-mail and tech support. HOB also sells patrons Blues Foundation Room membership packages and donates a portion of the proceeds toward the foundation’s overhead.

Yet, just about everything that happens for IHOBF beyond opening their doors relies on fundraising. IHOBF must, like all nonprofits, find a way to finance its programs. Pope concedes that their connection with HOB becomes a double-edged sword when it comes to seeking grants. “Some funders think, ‘You’re part of a big corporate entity, you should have plenty of money.’ But, we’re like any other struggling arts group.” In 2002, IHOBF spent more than $1.5 million providing their programs (including Blues Ambassador scholarships for college students), but their contributions and donations fell short of covering that.

Routine fundraising challenges aside, IHOBF continues to explore extending its impact and reach in the communities its serves. Jauron says about this longer view, “One of the things we’re looking to do is to build stronger relationships with schools and educators. To that end, we’re developing partnership models where we work with teachers in a workshop setting, provide them with support materials to prepare their community for SchoolHouse, and perhaps providing them with visiting artists to go on-site and interact with the community.”

For example, Pope is currently shepherding an on-site pilot program at Tilton Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side. She wants to find a way to integrate more fully the blues history and art projects into the school’s curriculum. “We have learned so much in a short period of time,” Pope says. “You have to do the pilots, they really inform your work. Every school is different.”

Like Pope in Chicago, each local IHOBF site can develop programs with the thought of offering them nationwide eventually. In this way, IHOBF shares resources and ideas across locations, but also allows room for local autonomy, capitalizing on unique resources, and fostering personal initiative.

After reflecting on IHOBF’s progress and community involvement, Jauron concluded:

The most compelling part of this organization and the real story is about what happens in the program setting. The vision of the organization is to have programming experiences that make kids have a greater understanding of American culture, a greater appreciation for diverse experiences, and to really inspire young people to find their own creative voices. That’s the real story and the real opportunity. And, in a sense, that’s the real challenge.

Visit the Web to learn more about the House of Blues (www.hob.com) and the International House of Blues Foundation. (www.ihobf.org).

Jennifer Roche is a writer and former executive editor for a major publishing company. She lives in Chicago.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2004