Ella Jenkins: A Life of Song

by Patricia Shehan Campbell

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The legacy of Ella Jenkins is a musical one. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924, she spent her childhood on the south side of Chicago. Her parents had come up from the south, a part of the Great Migration of black southerners who sought economic freedom in the North. From the 1920s on into the 1940s, her Chicago neighborhood was rich with live music—singing games, rhymes and rhythms, blues, blues-flavored folk songs, and the spirituals and gospel music of the local churches. Ella was surrounded with song from her earliest years, and she grew up under the influence of her “Uncle Flood,” who played blues harmonica and introduced her to the music of T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, and Big Bill Broonzy. She also heard live the music of Cab Calloway and Count Basie, who played at The Regal Theater, an important music venue in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

Ella couldn’t keep from singing, not in her youth and not in all the years she worked with children and the parents and teachers who raise them. She studied sociology, child psychology and recreation at San Francisco State University, and was drawn to the music of her own and other cultures. While working in youth camps and then as a YWCA program director for teens in the early 1950s, she led singing sessions that featured folk and traditional songs from her neighborhood, songs she was learning from Spanish-speaking friends, songs she happened across in Hebrew, Arabic, and French, and from India and the African continent, and songs she’d written. Ella had learned to play harmonica from her uncle, and could play an assortment of percussion instruments, along with the guitar and the ukulele. She could recall the rhythms she had internalized from her own childhood, and she set them in motion in her work with children at “the Y.” She was invited to appear on a Chicago public television show, and soon became the host of a program for children called “This is Rhythm.”

It was Ella’s decision to become a children’s singer, and thus she began her career as a professional touring musician, performing for school assemblies across the nation. She loved the children, and had the magic touch for inspiring their engagement in song and rhythm. Her singing was melodious, her percussive rhythms were crisp and clear, and her descriptions and directions for participatory musical experiences were always straightforward. Word spread about this childsong-singer who could make her way into groups of children and set them to singing and “rhythmicking.” Ella was composing and arranging songs and chants that she knew would entice and motivate singing in schools and preschools, and at teachers’ conferences and family concerts. She sought and succeeded in developing children’s musical repertoire and skill, even as they also gained in cultural understanding through the music they learned.

At Folkways Records in New York, Moses Asch was already committed to recording children’s music when he heard Ella’s songs, and he worked in 1957 to release her first album, Call-and-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing—a collection of eight chants created by Jenkins and inspired by West African traditions featuring conga drums, wood blocks, and other instruments typical of school classrooms. Ella’s strong and melodious voice carried the chants and songs with warmth and enthusiasm to her listeners, and directed them to a participatory experience in selected melodies and rhythms.

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