Portsmouth Middle School ushers in Black History Month with blues music, inspiring stories

PORTSMOUTH — The sounds of American blues music surged through the auditorium of Portsmouth Middle School on Wednesday morning during a rousing concert to usher in Black History Month.

The school, partnering with the Portsmouth Music and Arts Center, held a blues concert for hundreds of students to highlight the Black-created genre, an event that inspired dancing, raucous applause, standing ovations and questions from curious middle schoolers.

Portsmouth Music and Arts Center chief executive officer and co-founder Russ Grazier said the center is in the midst of forming a new blues music program for youth that will include blues bands for teenagers and pre-teens. The project, funded by Granite State Blues Society and through private donations, will bring the new program to coexist alongside its existing teen rock bands, jazz ensembles, and classical chamber music.

Inspiring young people through music

A first step in drawing the attention of young people to the blues music style was for the center to bring the Willie J. Laws Band, a quartet with five albums, to the school-wide event.

“Our goal is to help community youth understand the connections between blues and the popular music of today, and to inspire young people to play traditional and modern blues music,” Grazier said ahead of the show.

Laws, a guitarist raised in the Gulf Coast of Texas, and his three bandmates - electric bassist Lenny Bradford, drummer Osi Brathwaite and pianist Bruce Mattson - played a variety of blues subgenres for students and school staff, including the Delta blues, Chicago blues and the up-tempo “Jump” blues.

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At one point, Laws took his green guitar downstage and dazzled the audience by playing the instrument with his teeth, leading to a mosh of students crowding near the edge of the stage to witness the spectacle.

Concert inspired by Black History Month

Black History Month, which falls each February was originally called Negro History Week when created by historian and author Carter G. Woodson before the Great Depression.

Laws, a sixth-generation Texan now living in New England, spoke candidly about it.

“It’s just nice to be recognized. I’m hoping that through that recognition, we’ll start to find a little bit more empathy, compassion and love, that we’ll recognize each other and start to respect each other more. That’s what I’m really hoping for,” he said.

Haynes talks about his life and The Great Migration

Prior to the band’s performance, Richard Haynes, PhD, an artist and admissions counselor at the University of New Hampshire, gave a short presentation about his life, the Great Migration in the United States, his art, the value of education and Black history.

Born in 1949, Haynes grew up in segregated Charleston, South Carolina, a place where his parents picked cotton in the summer and worked as “the help,” cleaning and doing domestic work for wealthy white people. In 1957, Haynes and his family moved to 127th Street in Harlem, where they lived in dilapidated apartments with rats and cockroaches.

In New York, Haynes, with his family’s encouragement and an “angel” art teacher, Miriam Powers, as his guide, was introduced to the city’s artistic scene and inspired to create for himself. In later years, Haynes received a master’s degree in photography from Pratt Institute and took to drawing, with some of his work highlighting the Black experience, blues and jazz music, and portraying slaves passing through the Underground Railroad.

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The speech from Haynes was part of his presentation entitled “My Life, My Art, My Cultural Journey, and Hope,” in which he shared his highly-saturated artistic portfolio to Portsmouth Middle School students and staff, imploring them to embrace differences and show respect to one another.

“I’m only here to ask us: Can we love each other as human beings, sisters and brothers?” Haynes stated.

The celebration of Black History Month became a month-long commemoration in 1976.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Portsmouth NH school hosts Black History Month with blues concert