Coalition Teaches Students That Blues Get Bad Rap : Performers tell young blacks that the music is a positive force that should inspire pride.

The blues, long a musical mirror that reflected black life in America, has steadily fallen out of favor with many younger people of color because they view it as a bitter reminder of the bad old days of slavery and segregation.

Listen to the sounds from a car full of black teen-agers today and you are a thousand times more likely to hear M. C. Hammer than B. B. King.

That will change if a network of blues performers, schoolteachers and music preservationists has its way.

In schools across the nation, this hopeful coalition is trying to spark interest in the blues among black students by having artists visit classrooms, where they play, sing and lecture. White students also have participated.

In some places, the effort is known as “blues in the schools.” If the idea has a spiritual center, it is Memphis, where gray-haired black men pick guitars on Beale Street and mournfully sing hurting songs, drinking songs, somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs--and, putting on another blues face, cheerfully sing songs boasting of triumphant love.

The Memphis Arts Council and the Blues Foundation have worked to get performers into schools, where the artists discuss blues history, its heroes and how it relates to popular music that followed it.

Perhaps most important for black students, the artists emphasize the music as a positive force, one that should inspire pride, not shame.

Kenneth Jackson, a Memphis blues singer and musician who has performed with B. B. King, takes that message, along with a trumpet and guitar, to classes ranging from second grade to high school.

Jackson, 39, said students “turn off when I walk in the room. They say: ‘I don’t like blues. I like rap.’ ”

The first point he has to clear up, he said, is that the blues “is not a guy with three or four teeth in his mouth and a bottle of booze on his hip.”

In the end, Jackson said, students usually come around and “develop a sense of pride” about the blues as an art form that many legendary blues singers used as a way of criticizing societal wrongs and making money. Many of the youngsters go home and “educate their parents” about the blues, Jackson said.

Ironically, some of the blues messengers are white, reflecting a surge of white interest in the music that coincided with the loss of interest among black people.

One white blues man, T. J. Wheeler, a 39-year-old singer who lives in Hampton Falls, N.H., has conducted workshops in inner-city schools in Boston, Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans.

“Hope, Heroes and the Blues,” he calls his workshops.

“I try to emphasize that blues people were independent and a far cry from Uncle Toms,” Wheeler said. “They used the blues as a vehicle to freedom. They made pain work for them. Blues is a music of hope, born out of despair.”

Many of the blues legends cited in the programs--including King, Bobby (Blue) Bland, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith and Charles Brown--and many less well-known blues people are staples for Rojene Bailey, a blues preservationist and disc jockey at radio station WCLK in Atlanta.

Bailey, who uses his Saturday afternoon show and appearances in Atlanta-area schools to help inspire interest in the blues among young black students, has learned some simple truths from his collection of 7,000 blues albums, tapes and compact discs.

“Ninety percent of the songs you hear come from real-life experiences,” Bailey said he tells students. “You always get a message out of the blues. If singers were happy about something, they sang about it. If they were sad, they sang that too.”

Thus, he said, listening to blues recordings down through the years offers insight into black life and thought--a course in “black history 505.”

So, how goes the blues consciousness-raising effort?

In New Orleans, with 85,000 public school students, 90% black, Joe Mills, the school system’s music supervisor, said: “Our students are beginning to develop a better appreciation” for the blues and therefore a greater sense of self-esteem. “They’re excited.”

This development, he said, is part of the focus on multicultural curricula: “We’re not just dealing with European music. We’re looking at all music.”

Noting that the blues is an American art form, Mills said: “We hadn’t been blowing our own horn. Now we are.”