Obit: Ella Jenkins (1924-2024)

Subject: Folklore: Ella Jenkins
From: GayleW
Date: 30 Nov 22 - 10:03 AM

Hi, all! I'm writing a biography of the children's musician Ella Jenkins and wonder if there's anyone out there who remembers learning Ella's songs or seeing her perform. I'm especially interested in hearing from people who heard her in the late 1950s and 1960s--any Chicago folks out there?

For those who are unfamiliar... Ella began recording on Folkways in 1957 and is the label's most prolific--and one of its bestselling--artists. She got her start working as a "rhythm specialist" and teaching call-and-response songs accompanied by hand percussion (usually a conga drum). In the early 1960s, she began performing and composing with the baritone ukulele. She was a major popularizer of African American vernacular music, from chain-gang songs to play-party songs, for children during the folk revival, and was the first person to establish a career as a "children's musician" (as opposed to Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, or Pete Seeger, who performed and recorded for children but weren't known principally for their children's work).

Ella is now 98--a living legend! Thanks in advance.

Subject: RE: Ella Jenkins-songs for kids
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 11 Nov 24 - 12:10 PM

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.”

Subject: Obit: Ella Jenkins, music for kids, 1924-2024
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 11 Nov 24 - 12:37 PM

Ella Jenkins, who dedicated her life to creating and sharing music for children, died at age 100 on Saturday, November 9, 2024, in Chicago.

See also Mudcat thread Ella Jenkins-songs for kids

Ella Jenkins website (overseen by Smithsonian-Folkways)

Ella Jenkins - "Who Fed the Chickens?" [Live at the Smithsonian] (YouTube)

Ella Jenkins, the first lady of children's music, has died at 100 (National Public Radio)

Facebook post by Smithsonian-Folkways Recordings on Nov. 10 (all of her recordings were on that label, originally Folkways Records):

We mourn the passing of Ella Jenkins, one of the most iconic folk musicians of the 20th century, who revolutionized children’s music with her “call and response” chants and songs and educated, charmed, and empowered generations of listeners around the world. She died peacefully on Saturday, November 9, at her residence in Chicago, Illinois. She was 100 years old.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 6, 1924, Ella grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Over seven decades, she was a prolific performer, educator, composer, and recording artist, producing 39 albums on Folkways Records and Smithsonian Folkways. Drawing on her own history of civil rights activism in the 1940s and 1950s, Ella used music as a tool for social activism. Through songs and rhythms that extolled values of antiracism, cultural pluralism, and environmentalism, she drew people together, challenging them to listen deeply to one another.

Among her notable albums are ‘Call-and-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing’ (1957), ‘African American Folk Rhythms’ (1960), ‘You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song’ (1966), ‘A Long Time to Freedom’ (1970), ‘Multicultural Children’s Songs’ (1995), and ‘Ella Jenkins: A Life in Song’ (2011). Her well-known songs include “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” “Did You Feed My Cow?” and “Miss Mary Mack.”

For her creative work and service to children, Ella received dozens of accolades, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, an ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, and the NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 2017. Her song “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song” was added to the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2007, and her version of “Wade in the Water” was incorporated into Alvin Ailey’s modern dance classic “Revelations.” She was a regular on television programs for children, including “Sesame Street,” “Barney & Friends,” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Ella’s legacy will continue to educate and inspire, leaving a lasting impact on our world. She will be remembered for the potency of her messages — to be kind, to be curious — and for the many gifts she shared so freely, all the while encouraging others to do the same.

~ Becky in Oregon

Subject: RE: Obit: Ella Jenkins, music for kids, 1924-2024
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 11 Nov 24 - 12:38 PM

Ella Jenkins, Musician Who Found an Audience in Children, Dies at 100

Performing and recording, she transformed what was seen as a marginal genre in the music industry into a celebration of shared humanity.

By Mike Peed
The New York Times
Published Nov. 10, 2024

Ella Jenkins, a self-taught musician who defied her industry’s norms by recording and performing solely for children, and in doing so transformed a marginal and moralistic genre into a celebration of a diverse yet common humanity with songs like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 100.

Her death was confirmed by John Smith, associate director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Ms. Jenkins had no formal musical training, but she had an innate sense of rhythm. “I was always humming or singing and la-la, lu-lu or something,” she once said.

She absorbed the everyday melodies of her childhood — the playground clapping games, the high school sports chants, the calls of a sidewalk watermelon vendor hawking his produce. As an adult, she paired such singsong rhythms with original compositions and sought not simply to amuse or distract children but also to teach them to respect themselves and others.

Against the sound of a kazoo, a harmonica, a variety of hand drums or, later, a baritone ukulele, Ms. Jenkins sang subtly instructive lyrics, as in “A Neighborhood Is a Friendly Place,” a song she wrote in 1976:

You can say hi
To friends passing by
A neighborhood is a friendly place.

You can say hello
To people that you know
A neighborhood is a friendly place.

Neighbors learn to share
Neighbors learn to care
A neighborhood is a friendly place.

Over children’s steady clapping, she recorded the age-old “A Sailor Went to Sea”:

A sailor went to sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see, see, see
And all that he could see, see, see
Was down in the bottom of the sea, sea, sea.

For many parents and classroom teachers, Ms. Jenkins’s renditions of traditional nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” are authoritative.

Still, from the beginning of her career in the 1950s, she pronounced her signature to be call-and-response, in which she asked her charges to participate directly in the music-making, granting them an equal responsibility in a song’s success. She had seen Cab Calloway employ the technique in “Hi-De-Ho,” and for her, the animating idea, veiled in a playful to-and-fro, was that everything good in the world was born of collaboration.

In one of her most popular recordings, Ms. Jenkins sings out, “Did you feed my cow?” “Yes, ma’am!” a group of children trumpet back. The song continues:

Could you tell me how?
Yes, ma’am!
What did you feed her?
Corn and hay!
What did you feed her?
Corn and hay!

As she repopularized time-honored children’s songs, she also gave the genre global scope. Before Ms. Jenkins, children’s music in the United States consisted primarily of simplified, often cartoonish renditions of classical music.

But her first album, released in 1957 with the unfussy title “Call-and-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing,” features West African and Arabic chants as well as one from an American chain gang, which students from the Howalton Day School, the first Black private school in Chicago, helped Ms. Jenkins perform:

There he goes
Way across the field
They’ll never catch him
He’s gone.

Strains of racial justice pervade Ms. Jenkins’s music. As a young adult, she learned freedom songs at meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality, and she performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rally at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1964.

To commemorate the United States’ bicentennial in 1976, she released the album “We Are America’s Children.” Alongside a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the album includes a medley honoring Native Americans and the song “Black Children Was Born,” a salute to Harriet Tubman, Bessie Smith and other Black luminaries.

“I feel very strongly about making peace and love in the world,” Ms. Jenkins said.

Children sing on nearly all of Ms. Jenkins’s albums, and their mistakes were frequently left intact. A child’s premature clap on “Show Me,” from “Growing Up With Ella Jenkins” (1976), is followed, at the right moment, with a patient “Now clap.”

Ms. Jenkins released 39 albums, the last in 2017, and she spent her entire career with what is now Smithsonian Folkways Records. She was the label’s best-selling artist, and two of her albums — “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song” (1966) and “Multicultural Children’s Songs” (1995) — were its top releases.

Ms. Jenkins’s work received two nominations for the Grammy Award for best musical album for children, in 2000 and 2005. (She lost in 2005 to a tribute album of her own work.) In 2004, she was awarded the Grammy for lifetime achievement.

“There is no one who has done more for young people in American musical history than Ella Jenkins,” the children’s musician Dan Zanes has said.

Gayle Wald, a scholar of African American studies at George Washington University, credits Ms. Jenkins’s success to the “democratic ethos” that her kaleidoscopic repertoire aimed to engender in children. “In the beautiful world her music conjures,” Ms. Wald wrote, “we respond to each other’s calls.”

Ella Louise Jenkins was born on Aug. 6, 1924, in St. Louis. Her father, Obadiah Jenkins, was a factory worker, and her mother, Annabelle Walker, was a domestic one.

Her parents’ marriage was short-lived, and at an early age Ella moved with her mother and her older brother, Thomas, to the South Side of Chicago.

Her family could not afford music lessons, so Ella practiced percussion on baking-soda cans and mimicked a kazoo by drawing a piece of paper across the teeth of a plastic comb. “If you knew a lot of tunes, you could make yourself sound pretty good,” she said.

At night, she sat on her living room floor and listened to her Uncle Floyd, whom she called Flood, play blues harmonica. She often cited those evenings as her deepest musical influence.

Ella’s mother rebuked her for whistling — “A whistling girl and a crowing hen will come to no good end,” she would say — but she also worked overtime cleaning houses in Chicago’s wealthy neighborhoods so that she could buy her daughter a harmonica. The day Ella received the gift, she left it in a taxi while on her way to show it to Uncle Flood. “I cried for days and months,” she said.

Ms. Jenkins struggled to find work as a young Black woman in the early 1940s in a still-segregated Chicago. She was eventually hired to package K-rations at a converted Wrigley’s gum factory, and later found a job at the University of Chicago, where she delivered classified mail to Enrico Fermi and other atomic scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the school’s metallurgical laboratory.

In 1948, she won the Chicagoland Women’s Table Tennis Championship. She was invited to join the national table tennis team but could not afford the associated costs.

After a friend told Ms. Jenkins that community college was free, save for the cost of textbooks, she enrolled in Woodrow Wilson Junior College in Chicago. In 1951, she earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from San Francisco State University.

She returned to Chicago and became a program director for a South Side Y.W.C.A., where she led children in song. At night, she played the conga drum in open-mic hootenannies.

In 1956, a local television producer saw her performing for a group of children on the sidewalk and invited her to play on a Chicago public broadcasting program called “The Totem Club.” The appearance led to a regular segment for Ms. Jenkins, who named it “This Is Rhythm.”

Ms. Jenkins signed with Folkways that year, and after releasing “Call and Response” (1957), she began touring the country, and eventually the world, performing while collecting musical customs. Her travels led her to record a Maori battle chant, a Swahili counting song, a Mexican hand-clapping song and a Swiss yodeling song. Original compositions included “The World Is Big, the World Is Small.”

Children will “discover that although some things are different, many things are the same,” Ms. Jenkins wrote in the liner notes to “Multicultural Children’s Songs.” “Almost everywhere people count, balloons pop and friends say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you.’”

Ms. Jenkins never married. There are no immediate survivors.

She continued to perform into her 90s, often ending with her song “Shake Hands With Friends,” from 1976:

Shake hands with friends
It’s time to go.
And I hope I’ll see you another day.