Ella Jenkins, the prolific musician, educator, and entertainer often known as the “First Girl of Youngsters’s People Music,” has died. Smithsonian Folkways, the label that launched all 39 of Jenkins’ albums throughout her lifetime, confirmed the information in an announcement posted to Instagram, sharing that she died “peacefully” at her longtime Chicago, Illinois, house. She was 100 years previous.
Ella Louise Jenkins was born August 6, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri, although her household moved to Chicago’s south aspect shortly after. Regardless of receiving no formal musical coaching, it was right here Jenkins first found gospel music, blues, and rhyming kids’s songs and video games, in addition to being launched the harmonica by her Uncle Flood. In 1951, she graduated from San Francisco State College, the place she studied sociology, baby psychology, and recreation.
Upon returning to Chicago, Jenkins volunteered at numerous recreation facilities and started writing songs for kids. In 1952, she was employed as a teenage program director on the Y.W.C.A., and shortly after landed an everyday internet hosting spot on Chicago public entry tv, which she known as That is Rhythm. Jenkins grew to become a full-time musician in 1956, touring college assemblies throughout the U.S. She met the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, who urged she ship a demo tape to Folkways Data founder Moses Asch; the next yr, Asch launched Jenkins’ debut album Name-And-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing.
Jenkins put out a complete of 39 albums with Folkways, together with 1995’s Multicultural Youngsters’s Songs, which has lengthy been the label’s hottest launch. Her oeuvre consists of unique songs, nursery rhymes, African-American people, rhythmic chants, and worldwide songs in quite a few languages—with a robust emphasis on call-on-response singing that grew to become her signature. She appeared on Barney & Mates, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Sesame Road, and, in 2004, acquired a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy.
Jenkins’ track “You’ll Sing a Music and I’ll Sing a Music” was added to the Library of Congress’ Nationwide Recording Registry in 2007, and her last album, Camp Songs with Ella Jenkins and Mates, got here out in 2017. “She discovered this fashion of introducing kids to typically very tough matters and materials, however with a type of gentleness,” American research professor Gayle Wald stated in a New York Instances story on Jenkins’ centennial. “She by no means lied to them. She definitely by no means talked all the way down to them.”
