Ella Jenkins Has Died: ‘The First Lady Of Children’s Music’ Was 100

Ella Jenkins, a singer-songwriter known as the “first lady of children’s music,” has died. She was 100. 

According to NPR, John Smith, the associate director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, confirmed news of her passing. Jenkins had an enduring relationship with the nonprofit record label, recording 39 albums throughout her career of nearly seven decades. 

Finding her unique sound by way of church, folk and schoolyard influences, Jenkins, who was a self-taught musician with a natural understanding of rhythm, built a career on writing and performing music exclusively for children, a rarity in the mid-20th century, according to The New York Times. Her infectious renditions of nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” played a pivotal role in redefining children’s music and showed how music could be a tool for learning and empowerment. 

Jenkins’ career began in the 1950s when she quickly became known for her signature call-and-response technique, which she told NPR was inspired by jazz singer Cab Calloway’s 1931 song, “Minnie the Moocher,” specifically, it’s “Hi-dee hi-dee hi-dee hi” section. 

“Then you’d say it back — ‘ho-dee ho-dee ho-dee ho’,” she told the outlet. “So I started doing not only with his songs — I thought I would make up few songs myself. Children can learn very easily by imitating, following the leader and then pretty soon be able to teach it themselves.”

The success of Jenkins’ call-and-response led to Call-and-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing,” her first album, released in 1957, the Times reported. It featured West African and Arabic chants and one from an American chain gang, which included students from the Howalton Day School, the country’s first Black private school in Chicago. 

An avid advocate of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s, Jenkins’ lyricism and musicality was uplifting and conscious of the plight of the Black community, aiming at its youth to inspire change. Her activism brought her to Martin Luther King Jr.’s rally at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1964, where she performed. 

By the 1970s, Jenkins was a household name. In celebration of the bicentennial in 1976, she released We Are America’s Children. The album included a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which consists of a tribute to Indigenous Americans, and “Black Children Was Born,” an homage to Harriet Tubman, Bessie Smith and other Black visionaries of the 20th century. 

Jenkins appeared in many children’s programs, including Sesame Street, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and WTTW’s Totem Club. 

Jenkins continued to make music and perform for children throughout the 1980s and 1990s, releasing the popular album Multicultural Children’s Songs in 1995. She was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children in 2000 and 2005, losing the latter to an album in tribute to her work. Jenkins received the Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2004. 

Jenkins released her last album, Camp Songs With Ella Jenkins and Friends, in 2017. 

According to the Times, she never married and has no immediate survivors.