Ella Jenkins dead: Chicago's First Lady of Children's Music was XX

Children's musician Ella Jenkins, who encouraged millions of kids to sing along with her in a career that spanned more than 60 years, has died. She was 100.

Her publicist and friend of 35 years, Lynn Orman, told the Sun-Times she died peacefully on Saturday at a senior-living facility in Chicago. She was surrounded by family and old friends who were playing some of her favorite music, including tunes by Perry Como as well as some folk music.

"She forged through to her 100th birthday, there were so many people around her, and she was so excited," Orman said. "She was just invigorated and empowered by the music."

For decades, Ms. Jenkins walked out of her townhouse in Lincoln Park, instruments in hand, and traveled the city, state, country and world, singing to children, recording more than 40 albums and teaching her call-and-response-style folk music.

She's been called the first lady of children's music, received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award and saw her work immortalized in the Library of Congress.

"You would've thought she was Elvis," Orman said of how she was treated by celebrities like Tony Bennett when she received her Grammy in 2004.

"You bring people back to their childhood, and simplicity and the humble beginnings, and no matter who you are — I don't care if you're a big star — you can relate," Orman said. "It's just something that's very ethereal, and that's what she brought out in everyone."

Ms. Jenkins was born Aug. 6, 1924, in St. Louis but grew up in several places on Chicago's South Side, including near Washington Park.

Her father worked in a factory; her mother was a domestic worker. They separated when Ella was a child.

Her mother was concerned enough about money that if someone dropped a morsel of food, she would pick it up, brush it off and say, "That didn't fall. It only stumbled."

Ms. Jenkins said her mother was a "very fine" cook, ferociously clean, and had refined tastes through her exposure to wealthy homes.

As a child, Ella began experimenting with sounds.

"I got interested in percussion — tapping on tin cans, boxes, knees. I sang. I whistled. Though, `Girls don't whistle,' my mother told me," she told the Sun-Times in 1996.

Ms. Jenkins loved hearing her uncle, a steelworker, play the harmonica. She was inspired after seeing Cab Calloway perform to create call-and-response music.

Ms. Jenkins, who loved playing table tennis and won several tournaments in her youth, attended Phillips Elementary School and DuSable High School. After graduating in 1942, she went looking for a job and came up empty time after time.

"The color of my skin, that was it," she told the Sun-Times with a shrug. She got a job at the Wrigley Co. packaging prepared meals for soldiers in WWII.

She landed another gig delivering classified mail at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Three young, white co-workers encouraged her to go back to school. She enrolled at Wilson Junior College in 1945 and "became a different person when I got into college. I was very grateful for their encouragement," she says.

She also spent a year at Roosevelt University. Decades later, Ms. Jenkins tracked down all three of those women to thank them — she had to travel to Albuquerque to find one.

She moved to California in 1948 to "try it out" and studied sociology at San Francisco State College.

She had always loved Latin music, and after talking her way into a Jewish residence hall in San Francisco, she developed a fondness for Hebrew and Yiddish music. She hung around music stores, spending hours in soundproof booths listening to records.

"Then all of a sudden in college, at San Francisco State, I was singing in coffeehouses for adults," she said.

In 1952 she moved back to Chicago and began working as a program director for teenagers at a YWCA at 62nd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

While working at the YWCA, she came up with some innovative methods for teaching music and was asked to demonstrate them on "The Totem Club," a television show for children on WTTW.

The 1956 appearance was so successful that she got her own weekly segment, "This Is Rhythm," in which she invited performers from diverse backgrounds to demonstrate rhythm on "instruments" like tin cans, oatmeal boxes and typewriters.

Ms. Jenkins quit her job at the YWCA shortly after "This Is Rhythm" started.

She had read that the Soviet Union had devised a five-year plan for its economy, so she decided to give herself five years to make it as a folk singer. She went to New York with four songs she had written and met with Moses "Mo" Asch, founder of the Folkways label, who signed her on the spot.

Her first album, "Call and Response: Rhythmic Group Singing," came out in 1957.

Ms. Jenkins, who in her college days carried picket signs and participated in some "testing" of businesses that were illegally refusing to serve Blacks, encountered significant discrimination in the early '60s while on tour for the School Assembly Service, an agency that hired artists to perform at schools.

Once, after having been turned away from a motel in the middle of the night because of her skin color, she insisted that the organizers guarantee her a place to sleep as a condition of her continuing the tour.

She's performed on every continent. In Antarctica her audience included a few children of researchers and a throng of penguins.

"I had my harmonica. The penguins were very curious about me," she told the Sun-Times.

Ms. Jenkins, who composed her own music, became a celebrity of sorts.

"I get all kinds of hellos at airports and bus stations," she said. "Wherever I go, children want to shake hands."

Grownups sometimes broke into song when encountering Ms. Jenkins decades after seeing her perform in their youth.

More than a million kids saw her live, she estimated, and millions more watched her on television shows, including on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Sesame Street."

Ms. Jenkins frequently appeared at Ravinia and the Old Town School of Folk Music.

"Songs can teach you something about life and other people, other countries," she said.

She carried a tape recorder while traveling abroad to record words and phrases she used as source material when composing.

She was known for the colorful ponchos she wore.

Ms. Jenkins, who never married or had kids, relied on a close group of friends for support, including Tim Ferrin, a filmmaker who began putting together a documentary about her a few years ago.

He described her as "a person of extreme integrity and love."

“It’s a big deal when she sees kids,” her longtime manager and friend Bernadelle Richter said in 2023. “It’s like an infusion for her. She’s always thinking about kids and how the world relates to them and how they relate to the world.”

Ms. Jenkins’ last appearance in front of a live audience was in 2017. She most recently lived at an assisted-living facility on the North Side.

When asked during a 2023 interview to comment on her legacy and many accomplishments, Ms. Jenkins instead tapped into lyrics from one of her classics and offered a little advice.

"We're all in this world together in warm or wintry weather," she said. "Just be yourself."

Ms. Jenkins had one brother, Tom, a professor of city planning and sociology at the University of Cincinnati who passed away in 2011.

A small, private service will be held Friday, and a public tribute is being planned for next August, Orman said.

Contributing: Violet Miller