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.
Ms. Jenkins in 2004 at the Grammys, where she received a lifetime achievement award. With her is Neil Portnow, the chairman and chief executive of the Recording Academy.© R. Diamond/WireImage — Getty Images
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.
Ms. Jenkins in 2014 posing for a portrait two days before her 90th birthday. “I feel very strongly about making peace and love in the world,” she once said.© Spencer M. Green/Associated Press
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.’”
She is survived by her longtime companion, Bernadelle Richter, who was also her manager.
Ms. Jenkins 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.
