Photo courtesy The Blue Shoe Project
Photo courtesy The Blue Shoe Project
Photo courtesy The Blue Shoe ProjectKids learn history, music and culture through the blues
It started with four old bluesmen up on the stage one night at the Palace Theater in Grapevine, telling their stories and singing the blues.
They're all dead and gone now — Robert Lockwood Jr., Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins, David "Honeyboy" Edwards and Henry Townsend. But a live recording they made the next night in Dallas won a Grammy in 2008. And the Colleyville nonprofit that pulled those two shows together in 2004 still is carrying out its original mission: to make sure children know all about the blues, an engaging way to teach them also about history.
Today, Michael Dyson is known by his thousands of young fans as Mr. Blue Shoes. With a backward baseball cap, an electric guitar, kid-friendly jokes and, of course, blue shoes, Dyson engages children with music but at the same time teaches them about West African culture; the Great Migration of millions of black Americans out of the South and into the rest of the country; and other history of the early 20th century.
"There are tons of kids out there, you can teach them all day long out of a book, but it takes somebody like a musician coming in and telling the same story with a guitar to get them to learn it," Dyson said.
