Blues Lessons Strike a Chord With Children : Music: Nightclub puts the spotlight on education with its program tracing the music to its origins in Africa.

On a softly lit nightclub stage, backed by a rhythm guitar, bass and drums playing a driving blues riff, Adriane Michel grasped a microphone in her two small hands and belted out the “Schoolgirl Blues.”

“Woke up this morning, and I didn’t know what to do

So I decided to sing the blues

Then I called my friends

But they were out at the mall

and I didn’t have any breakfast

so that’s why I’m singing the blues . . . . “

The other fourth- and fifth-graders from Manhattan Elementary School in South Los Angeles clapped and laughed as Adriane, 9, and a few others shyly walked up to the microphone on the House of Blues stage. They told their tales of lost shoes, too much homework and fights with playmates--facts of life that give youngsters the blues.

Three times a week, House of Blues, the hot West Hollywood nightspot, becomes a classroom and museum. Storytellers, educators, musicians and art experts lead groups of students from Los Angeles schools on a cultural history tour, using the club’s African masks and contemporary folk art to trace the lineage between African and American culture.

In a matter of three hours, the students had been led back 300 years to West Africa to learn that rites of passage and religious ceremony centered on the drum. Storytellers act out experiences of black slaves in the 18th- and 19th-Century American South, telling how slaves created a communications network using work songs and spirituals.

All this, the musicians and educators explained, lay the foundation for a true American music form: the blues.

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The educational program is run by the International House of Blues Foundation. Last year, the foundation held similar programs for students at House of Blues clubs in Cambridge, Mass., and New Orleans. Another will start next year in New York.

With arts and music programs disappearing in most public schools, programs like this are desperately needed, said Issac Tigrett, chief executive officer of House of Blues.

“It’s pretty extraordinary that entertainment is our biggest export, but no arts or music are being taught in the schools,” he said. The programs on the blues, he added, “plant seeds, try to promote dignity. Most kids don’t even know about the contributions African Americans have made over the years. So when they find out these men and women created this music and art, it really turns them on.”

During the program, students learn that the air conditioner and the baby stroller were among many inventions created by African Americans.

The House of Blues Foundation’s board of directors developed the education program last year in Cambridge. The board includes educators from Harvard University, the Boston and Cambridge school systems, the Berklee College of Music and the University of Mississippi.

The absence of blues education in schools leaves children in the dark about an important chapter of American history, said William Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

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“Traditionally, classical music was appropriate to teach to children, and we turned our backs on our own cultural heritage,” said Ferris, whose center houses the largest blues and Southern culture archives in the nation. Now, he said, “the blues are no longer just the music of rural Southern blacks, but an American art form that has inspired and shaped everything from gospel to rock ‘n’ roll, and more recently, to rap.”

Although most schools expressed interest in participating in the program, transportation costs have been prohibitive for some, said Kim McPherson, a program director at the club.

“It costs about $250 to get a bus for one day,” McPherson said. The foundation is seeking more corporate sponsorship “so that we can reach as many schools as possible.”

To further blues education in schools, the University of Mississippi will hold a summer course co-sponsored by House of Blues to help selected Los Angeles teachers develop their own *

Judith Byard, a fourth-grade teacher at Manhattan Elementary, said she was impressed by the club’s efforts to make the learning experience an intimate one.

“I was surprised. I expected a whole lot of other children here,” said Byard, who accompanied 30 children to the club. The students were surprised too. They asked me, ‘It’s just us?’ They felt very special.”

At one of the recent classes, the students toured the House of Blues, then returned to the stage area. The curtain rose and the band “Black Coffee and Jam” played an Elmore James tune called “Dust My Broom.”

“Do you know what the blues are?” asked Sheldon Strickland, the band’s front man.

“It’s old-time music,” volunteered one child, as the others giggled. Not true, explained Strickland. Then the band got the children dancing when they played “Lucille” by Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” That music, he told the children, had its roots in the blues.

After singing the blues with the band, Adriane Michel said being on stage “was like being a movie star.” The program, she said, was “excellent. I really liked all the arts, and the stories about the ancestors.”

Lena Roberts, the parent of a fourth-grader, was wary of an education program sponsored by a blues club. “I expected to hear a lot of blues, but I didn’t expect the teaching of culture,” she said. African American children who miss the lessons about their history “sometimes don’t feel that sense of pride that they should, but when you see something like this, learning about black inventors and the arts and the history of this music, it builds you up.”