She has been honored with an illustrious Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her trailblazing children’s music career has spanned 70-some years, 60-some recordings and innumerable performances around the world — literally encompassing all seven continents. Her signature tune, “You’ll Sing a Song,” was inducted into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress, in the company of such historically significant kindred works as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet,” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
And now Chicago’s own Ella Jenkins, long hailed as the First Lady of Children’s Music, is turning 100.
On Sunday, the city of Chicago will celebrate Jenkins’ centennial at her namesake Ella Jenkins Park in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood, 333 W. Wisconsin Ave., from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
On Tuesday — Jenkins’ actual birthday, having been born in 1924 in St. Louis — the Old Town School of Folk Music’s long-running Wiggleworms family music class for young children will be themed “Happy Birthday, Ella Jenkins!” Instructors/performers Shanta Nurullah and Mars Caulton’s class will feature Jenkins’ multicultural, multilingual, interactive songs, which have been favorites of educators since her 1957 debut album “Call and Response.”
On a sunshiny Sunday in mid-July, Jenkins received a pair of guests in her room at the North Side assisted-living establishment she’s called home for the last 10 years. She was relishing the tree-filled view from her windows as much as she savored her lunch of salmon, mashed potatoes and broccoli.
With her legs snug under an African kente-cloth-patterned blanket of orange, gold, red, green and blue, Jenkins perused the new children’s picture-book biography, “A Life of Song: The Story of Ella Jenkins,” written by Ty-Juana Taylor and released Feb. 27.
“A Life of Song” by Ty-Juana Taylor and Jade Johnson.
One of the visitors read aloud from the slim, vibrantly drawn (by artist Jade Johnson) hardcover, “Ella lived with her mother, brother, Aunt Big Mama, and Uncle Flood.”
The words prompted Jenkins to reminisce about growing up in Bronzeville and elsewhere on the South Side: “Uncle Flood [who toiled in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana] would come home from work, put on a clean shirt and suspenders — and play the harmonica.”
Young Ella “hummed and whistled along,” Taylor writes, to her uncle’s harmonica melodies and fashioned her own blues harp from a comb wrapped in tissue paper— until her hardworking mother Annabelle scratched together enough cash to present her daughter with the real thing.
At one point, Taylor writes, Ella’s brother Tom took her to see famed jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway at the legendary, now-shuttered Bronzeville venue the Regal Theater.
“Cab Calloway always wore light-colored suits,” Jenkins said, nodding when shown Johnson’s drawing of ivory-clad Calloway at a mic, letting rip the famous call-and-response chorus of his most famous song, “Minnie the Moocher.”
“Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi!” Jenkins sang out with gusto, directing her visitors to repeat the lines. “Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho! He-de-he-de-de-de-he!”
The interplay between Calloway and audience is what inspired Jenkins to work the concept of “call and response” — with its West African provenance — into her own burgeoning musical repertoire, which would prove galvanizing to her future audiences.
Ella Jenkins is photographed in 2014 in in Storyteller Corner at Bauler Playlot Park, which was dedicated to the author-singer.
Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times File
“A Life of Song” touches on Jenkins’ college career in San Francisco, where she in fact majored in child psychology.
“She lived and worked at a Jewish girls’ boarding home,” author Taylor details, noting, “The girls taught her Jewish songs and told her about Jewish culture.”
As these words were read aloud, Jenkins started singing one of those traditional tunes, “Shabbat Shalom.” It appears on her 2014 album “More Multicultural Songs from Ella Jenkins,” on Smithsonian Folkways, the label for whom she recorded throughout her career.
“A Life of Song” by Ty-Juana Taylor and Jade Johnson.
Smithsonian Folkways is celebrating Ella’s 100th birthday with reissues of both her landmark 1966 album “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song” and her 1969 LP “A Long Time to Freedom,” along with a new album from children’s artists Dan and Claudia Zanes. “Pieces of Home” features the single “Guide My Feet (for Ella Jenkins),” a tribute to her centenary.
Grammy winner Dan Zanes, co-founder of Boston’s rootsy garage band the Del Fuegos, previously performed “Guide My Feet” — which Ella had learned from 1960s voting-rights activists the Freedom Riders — at a 2017 ceremony saluting Jenkins’ NEA National Heritage Fellowship lifetime honor.
The term “children’s music,” Zanes observed, “so often refers to songs that are particular to their experiences. Ella was a master of these but, like Lead Belly, she also gave children songs that were a window to the world outside. Unions, multiculturalism, African American history, spirituality … it was all there, natural and inviting.”
And what does the artist herself think about turning 100?
“I think,” Jenkins said with a chuckle, “that it’s another nice year.”