Ella Jenkins died Saturday, November 9, 2024, in Chicago. Here is the text of the article linked above by keberoxu.

~ Becky in Oregon


How 100-Year-Old Ella Jenkins Revolutionized Children’s Music

Over seven decades, she brought a world of genres and ideas to songs for the young. On her centennial, what she would really like to do is perform again.

By Laurel Graeber
The New York Times
Aug. 5, 2024

When Ella Jenkins began recording young people’s music in the 1950s and ’60s, her albums featured tracks that many of that era’s parents and teachers would probably never have dreamed of playing for children: a love chant from North Africa. A Mexican hand-clapping song. A Maori Indian battle chant. And even “Another Man Done Gone,” an American chain-gang lament whose lyrics she changed, turning it into a freedom cry.

“She found this way of introducing children to sometimes very difficult topics and material, but with a kind of gentleness,” said Gayle Wald, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jenkins. “She never lied to them. She certainly never talked down to them.”

Jenkins’s unorthodox approach became a huge success: She is the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, surpassing even such stalwarts of the label as Woody Guthrie and her friend Pete Seeger. A champion of diversity long before the term became popular, Jenkins helped revolutionize music for the young, purposefully encouraging Black children.

In addition to introducing global material, which she often recorded with children’s choruses, she wrote original, interactive compositions like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” now part of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

“Before Ella, very few people actually composed for children,” Wald said in a video interview.

You might think that Jenkins, who will celebrate her 100th birthday on Tuesday, would now want to relax and savor her many accolades, among them lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and ASCAP, the music licensing agency, as well as a designation as a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow. But in a brief telephone conversation from her home in an assisted-living center in Chicago, she seemed unconcerned with plans for her centenary in the city, which include a Tuesday morning celebration with young students from the Old Town School of Folk Music, and a showcase on Wednesday with performances by children from Kids on the Move Summer Camp.

What she would really like to do — although her fragile health prevents it — is to perform again herself. “I want to get well and get back on the job, where I’m working with other people, working with children,” she said. “I work with them, and they work with me. I enjoy work.”

Jenkins’s efforts, which comprise more than 40 recordings, began on Chicago’s South Side, where she grew up. Although never formally trained as a musician, she learned harmonica from her Uncle Flood and absorbed a variety of musical traditions through neighborhood moves and jobs as a camp counselor. After graduating from what was then known as San Francisco State College, she directed teen programs at the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which helped cement her love for children. Her street performances led to an offer to do young people’s music segments on local television, a debut that would be followed years later by appearances on shows like “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

“Her curiosity is so insatiable,” said Tim Ferrin, a Chicago filmmaker who is completing a documentary, “Ella Jenkins: We’ll Sing a Song Together.” He added, “I think she saw herself as a conduit, as somebody who could then share that enthusiasm, share that understanding.”

Often called “the first lady of children’s music,” Jenkins captivated her listeners because she presented music not as lessons but as play. A charismatic performer whose accompaniment often consisted of only a baritone ukulele and some percussion, she encouraged her young audiences not to sit still but to get up and move. Using a signature call-and-response technique that she adapted from African tradition and artists like Cab Calloway, she engaged her listeners in a musical conversation, even if they didn’t understand what they were singing.

“She made it very immediate and not exotic,” said Tony Seeger, an ethnomusicologist and the founding director of Smithsonian Folkways.

Teachers also became ardent fans, said Seeger, who is Pete Seeger’s nephew and collaborated with Jenkins on her latest album, “Camp Songs With Ella Jenkins and Friends” (2017). At a Chicago convention of the National Association for the Education of Young Children in the 1990s, he recalled, so many members tried to crowd into a Jenkins concert that the organizers shut the doors. Those excluded responded with frenzied knocking.

“It was astounding, her popularity, and also the insistence with which these preschool teachers were pounding on the door,” Seeger said, chuckling in a video interview. “I mean, you don’t think that they would do that sort of thing. But they did.”

Over her long career, Jenkins has proved adept at getting people to do things they otherwise might not. While never preaching to listeners, her music aimed to turn strangers into friends.

“At almost 100, if she’s feeling up to it, she can get a group of people participating together who have never met each other, right?” Ferrin said. “It’s a social act. You could say it’s a political act. And that’s part of the core of who she is, and why she makes music.”

Jenkins has also been more overtly political. An early member of the Congress of Racial Equality, she participated in demonstrations and performed at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Illinois Rally for Civil Rights in 1964. Her own experiences fueled her commitment: While touring and performing school concerts in the Midwest in the early 1960s, she often experienced discrimination, once calling a principal in the middle of the night to tell him she couldn’t appear at his school if he didn’t find her accommodations that wouldn’t turn her away because she was Black.

“She’s very universal for all children,” said the musician and composer Angel Bat Dawid in a video call. “But you know, a lot of times, there’s a lack of understanding of how Black Ella Jenkins was, and how her music was about uplifting Black children.”

The evidence is in the recordings. Jenkins wrote “Black Children Was Born,” a song from her bicentennial album, “We Are America’s Children,” with lyrics proudly calling out the names of African Americans like King, Harriet Tubman and Mahalia Jackson. Another album, “A Long Time” (1970), was devoted to civil rights, with both Black spirituals and tracks like Jenkins’s own determined “I’m Gonna Ride This Train.” That album is now available in a new vinyl edition, along with Jenkins’s signature 1966 collection, “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” which features “Guide Me,” Jenkins’s version of a spiritual popular with the Freedom Riders.

“That’s really not what you would think of as a children’s song,” Dan Zanes, of the married children’s musical duo Dan + Claudia Zanes, said in a video interview. But the couple chose to record their own adaptation, “Guide My Feet (for Ella Jenkins)” for their forthcoming album, “Pieces of Home.” They admired its message of faith and unity and, Zanes added, “it showed another side of Ella Jenkins than the one people typically think of.”

With all the acclaim she’s received, it’s hard not to wonder why Jenkins is not as much of a household name as some of her folk-revival contemporaries. Wald, her biographer, noted that Jenkins had been offered opportunities to become a nightclub performer early in her career, but had turned them down. Even though material for young audiences often earns less respect in the musical world, Jenkins, who never married or had a family herself, has remained singularly devoted to children.

“They do a lot for me,” she said, “and I do a lot for them.”