After a long day of classes—the kind that leaves junior Deven Aurora drained and irritated—Blues Club doesn’t feel like an extracurricular. It feels like relief.
“All I’m thinking is, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get to Blues Club,’” Aurora said. “I can’t wait to play guitar.”
By the time the bandroom door swings open, that exhaustion has already begun to fade. The amps blink awake, the PA hums and the leftover frustration settles into fingers and frets, turning stress into sound.
To someone outside the room, Blues Club might look like nothing more than a few students improvising after school. For Aurora, though, every note reflects a feeling, and the music itself takes on the mood of the players.
“Playing the blues is really simple,” Aurora said. “You just need to know your scales. It’s like talking, but your mood dictates it.”
Aurora thinks of it as a chef blending flavors. Each musician carries their own emotional ingredient, and when the happiness and sadness built up during the day blend through their playing, the result is music he calls “beautifully blue.”
That balance of music and emotion didn’t happen overnight. The club’s roots trace back 22 years ago, when physics teacher Stephen Houpt, then a new faculty member with a lifetime of bands behind him, wanted a place to play blues at the school.
The first meeting was held in the physics room—no songs, no vocals, just a small group of people bound together by a shared love for blues. As the club grew, it moved from that original room, to the old planetarium and eventually to the band room where they meet every Tuesday.
“We started off just playing blues-style music (without any particular song or direction),” Houpt said. “As time went by, we started playing actual songs. And probably 15 years ago or so, we started playing at Austin Street Homeless Shelter.”
The club not only keeps the tradition of classic blues alive but also brings music to the community, performing for those in need several times a year. This commitment to service and performance has shaped more than just the club’s schedule; it has defined its culture.
Two decades later, Aurora sits in the same band room, carrying forward that same energy and tradition. He and co-president Eli Thorne usually arrive early to set up and prepare.
“(Thorne) and I usually show up first,” Aurora said. “We’ve been in it the longest, so we know where stuff goes.”
Most days, there aren’t full warmups at all. Because of homework, sports, meetings and lessons, members often rush in right as rehearsal starts, plug in their instruments and jump straight into the songs. The instruments hum under their fingers as chords and melodies fill the room, and every misstep is met with a quick correction before flowing onto the next line.
“We don’t really warm up,” Aurora said. “The most we’ll do is some Spongebob music. We just start playing the song, run it through and fix stuff as we go.”
In November, the club started practicing for its performance at the Kindness Festival, held in the AT&T Performing Arts Center. The festival closes out Dallas Kindness Week, a celebration that aims to unite the community through the compassion and connection of live performances, storytelling and family activities.
As the event grew nearer, the club’s weekly ritual transformed into a deliberate rehearsal for a big stage, and they poured attention into truly mastering their setlist.
They practiced. They prepared. They ran the same songs until the transitions smoothed out.The band kept waiting for the moment when everyone’s music would finally fall into place.
On the night of the Kindness Festival, things began as usual.
A quick little warmup, playing the songs they had practiced for weeks.
“We didn’t do anything special,” Aurora said. “We just played the songs and were like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool. It’s good.’ We already had those songs down.”
Then came the time. Sweat slicked on their forehead as they lugged amps, drums and a rolling drum riser onto the black, rubber-coated stage. The monitors were nearly useless, and the space seemed to swallow sound. They couldn’t hear themselves at all, forcing each member to guess at what everyone else was playing.
“We sounded good, but there wasn’t that connection,” Aurora said. “There wasn’t that special moment.”
That moment they had been waiting for never arrived.
Still, there was a quiet sense of accomplishment afterward. Once the nerves and confusion were behind them, Houpt told them they had played well, and the band felt proud of what they had achieved together.
Walking into the band room after school, the chairs were arranged in their usual semicircle, and the instruments sat ready on stands. Only the four students and a couple faculty members show up, the small sound of their footsteps making the space seem even more empty.
They tune anyway. Fingers fly across frets, bass notes thrum, piano notes ripple across the space as the room fills with the same rough, imperfect music that has kept the club alive for the last 22 years.
And through it all, the Blues Club keeps practicing classic songs and performing at school events and at Austin Street Center, combining music, community service and camaraderie—a rhythm they plan to keep going.