Perelman American Roots students

The students spin into the library like unwound tops. They’ve endured a morning of standardized math tests, and their released stores of energy bubble over and burst into peals of laughter at nearly anything.

This is the eighth-grade class of Paul Byrne, a social studies teacher at Middle School 223, located in Mott Haven, Bronx. And these students are here to see their work made real by blues guitarist and teaching artist “Little” Toby Walker, in his final school visit as part of the Perelman American Roots program of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.

Throughout the course, subtitled “The Blues and the Great Migration,” students have listened to various blues songs from artists like Son House, Camille Howard, and Muddy Waters. In his previous visit, Walker taught the students a simple blues AAB verse form—write one line, repeat it, then write a third line that rhymes with the first two. Continue for several stanzas. Now, after the students have worked in groups to write their own songs, Toby is here to perform them.

The opening efforts have titles like “Boring” and “School Is Wack” (“Everyday it’s just detention / Sooner or later it turns to suspension”). Walker gamely interprets these in work-song and Mississippi Delta styles on acoustic guitar and harmonica. All are accompanied by bouts of student laughter at each other’s awkward rhymes and attempts at humor.

Then Walker comes to the innocuously titled “Daddykins.” At first, the five girls who wrote it giggle in embarrassment. Then Walker begins, now on his electric guitar, playing in a Chicago blues style.

“Daddy done left me when I was four,” he sings. And suddenly the silly laughter becomes anxious; a tautness develops in the air. “Daddy done left me when I was four. / It just don’t feel like he loves me no more.” Though their eyes may dart all over the room, it’s clear he’s captured their attention. “They just went and took him away,” he continues, “Oh they just went and took him away / Oh why, oh why couldn’t he just stay?”

Next, Walker pauses to coax out of his guitar a “cry,” “a yell,” he explains to the students. By now everyone is silent, even if only for a few seconds, as Walker shakes the chords from his trembling instrument. When the gaggle of girls cracks up again at the end of their song, balance is restored, but with the knowledge, at least among the adults, that something significant happened for a moment.

Later, Walker explains that most of the songs the students write about their lives are “pretty lighthearted.” However, “that ‘Daddykins’ song was one of the heaviest I’ve sung,” he states.

Jasmine, aged 13, honor-roll student, longtime vegetarian, and aspiring doctor, was one of the girls who wrote that song.

“We all had this problem in common,” she says. “Most of us don’t live with our fathers.” Jasmine’s “us,” she explains, encompasses her friends, her classmates, and her neighborhood. “We’re all kind of used to it—maybe we’re too used to it,” she says.

From Perelman American Roots, she explains, she’s developed an understanding of how the African Americans who gave birth to the blues in the Jim Crow South must have felt. “Maybe that’s how they got the anger out,” she concludes. “Show how they felt without doing it in a mean way.”