Home of the blues. Laboratory for the skyscraper. Birthplace of atomic energy. And cradle of children’s music?
Ella Jenkins performs at Wonder Works in Oak Park on Sunday, February 20, 2011.
Andrew A. Nelles/Chicago News Cooperative
No one disputes Chicago’s legacy in many great endeavors, but that last one also deserves notice, given the contribution by Ella Jenkins, a founding mother of children’s music. Jenkins, now 86 , was the first artist to tailor her gifts — as singer, songwriter and player of instruments from around the world — exclusively to little ones. (Scroll down for a video of Ella Jenkins performing.)
“I can’t remember when I wasn’t aware of Ella’s name and her seminal recordings. It’s like asking when did you become aware that oxygen was there?” said Ralph Covert, a Chicago singer-songwriter whose “Ralph’s World” recordings and concerts place him among the most successful artists in the field.
“To be a kids’ artist in 1957, full time — well, there was no such thing,” said Fred Koch, a musician who has been reviewing children’s albums since 1997. “She’s really the trailblazer.”
Unlike her fellow pioneers in arts and science, Ms. Jenkins still performs regularly, with a zeal unsurpassed by artists one-third her age. In February she released “A Life in Song” on Smithsonian Folkways Records, the same label on which she recorded her debut 55 years ago. And on Friday night she sang for her second favorite audience — adults, many of whom grew up on her records — at a gala for the 50th anniversary of Urban Gateways, the Chicago arts-education organization.
Ms. Jenkins was among 50 honorees, a Who’s Who of local educators, artists and arts advocates. Few have combined their skills with such longevity and accomplishment as Ms. Jenkins.
“Ella Jenkins is a superstar of preschool children’s music,” said Anthony Seeger, professor of ethnomusicology at U.C.L.A., director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways and nephew of Pete Seeger. “I’ve seen parents breathlessly introduce their children to her, saying, ‘My mother took me to one of your concerts when I was my child’s age, and I never forgot it.’ ”
Ms. Jenkins’s rapport with young audiences seems to emanate from her respect for them. “I always feel that if you can be natural with children, treat them like the personalities that they are and take time to hear what they have to say — sometimes you can learn a great deal,” said Ms. Jenkins, who never married or had children of her own.
Ms. Jenkins’s career path has colorful ties to Chicago history. Working in the mail room at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, she sorted correspondence for Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists trying to split the atom. Encouraged by women on the faculty there, she earned a degree in sociology from San Francisco State University, a rare accomplishment for an African-American woman from Chicago’s South Side.
Returning to Chicago, Ms. Jenkins started applying her lifelong love of music and poetry to her social work with teenagers, and then children, at the Y.W.C.A. Meanwhile, she immersed herself in the growing mid-’50s folk revival, lugging her conga drum to accompany her singing at open-microphone hootenannies at the Gate of Horn and other long-shuttered clubs.
She soon began writing her own songs for children, a catalog of work that now totals more than 100. When she felt ready, she headed to New York and returned with a contract from Folkways Records, the label at the center of the folk revival.
Folk stars like Burl Ives and her longtime friend Pete Seeger had dabbled in children’s music, as had more whimsical popular entertainers like Danny Kaye. Thanks largely to Ms. Jenkins, Chicago is where the children’s-music genre came to maturity, and it stayed there for three generations of musical descendants.
Ms. Jenkins brought something new to the form, as described by the title of her first album, “Call and Response: Rhythmic Group Singing.” Derived from the field hollers once used by African-American slaves, “call and response” encouraged audience participation and was thus ideal for young listeners.
“I’m biased, but if you just list the talent coming out of Chicago, I don’t think any other city could challenge it,” Mr. Koch said. “Ella invented the genre, and she’s here; we’ve had the luxury of seeing her close-up and person-to-person, and she’s inspired us all.”
Mr. Covert added that the children’s music “revolution” of the last 15 years “was indeed based in Chicago and at least indirectly linked to Ella’s identity as part of the Chicago folk scene in the ’50s.”
“A Life of Song” is the 36th album under Ms. Jenkins’s name, along with several anthologies of her songs as performed by others. The best known remains “cELLAbration,” a 2004 tribute album featuring Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin and the pop-gospel sextet Sweet Honey in the Rock. Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, who work together as the folk duo Cathy & Marcy, produced and contributed several tracks to the album, which won a Grammy Award as best musical album for children in 2005.
“I think she saw herself as a peer of Odetta and other folk singers in the ’50s,” said Ms. Fink, who spearheaded the effort that honored Ms. Jenkins with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. “She would have been happy to do other things as well, but she had this special talent at reaching children, and in a ’50s way it sort of went viral.”